Choose the .txt file you want to crawl (in the video example it was flooringlinks.txt) and click Start:

Grab a beer whilst it crawls

When it gets to 100%, export all the 4xx links by going to Advanced Export > Client Error (4xx) In Links:

The SEO Spider found hundreds of broken links:

At this point you can either just reach out to the people who own those links pages and fix their broken links:

Or…go DEEPER and find ALL the sites that are linking to these broken links and reach out to them too:

So let’s go deeper and find ALL the sites linking to those broken pages.

Because there are a lot of duplicate URLs you’ll need to use Ontolo’s Remove Duplicate Items tool. (This is different to the Remove Duplicate Hostnames tool, because it doesn’t remove different URLs from the same site):

This new (and final Excel sheet) is to prepare the prospects for email outreach with BuzzStream!

In the new Excel, name column #1 “Linking From” and paste in that de-duped list:

Name column #2 “Domain”:

Now, copy all URLs with no “www.” and use Ontolo’s Extract Unique Hostnames tool to strip the URLs to their root domain, then paste the root domains into the Domain column:

Then repeat the process for the “www.” URLs. (The reason why you need to do this chunk of URLs separately is because Ontolo’s tool often mismatches the list if you do them all together and then it’s a nightmare to line them up in the Excel).

I also name column #4 “Link Link Tag”, which is a Custom Links Field I use to tag my link prospects in BuzzStream – this makes it easy for me to find this group of prospects later once I upload them into my little black book of contacts:

Upload your list of prospects to the project via the Link Monitoring tab:

When you upload the file, make sure the data fields match up correctly:

Whilst BuzzStream is scraping contact details from those sites, you can create an email template for outreach:

Use the [ul:Linking From] field:

By the time you’ve finished creating your email template BuzzStream should have finished scraping those contact details!

Sort by discovered contact info and select all the people BuzzStream found emails for so you can begin outreach IMMEDIATELY:

(Naturally, for the remaining contacts BuzzStream couldn’t find emails for you’ll either need to visit those sites yourself or outsource the research to someone else).

Click “Start Outreach” and choose the email template you just created:

The [ul:LinkingFrom] field should now be replaced with the correct URL:

You can schedule your emails for later or send now:

The Result?

After just sending 4 emails I received this reply:

Which was a VERY nice link on a PR4 page:

And that’s my process for expired domain link building! I hope it helps you create your own efficient routine!

I just wanted to share with you the exact way I build links using expired domains because this is one of the main methods I’ve been using to build a ton of links to my new niche site and take my traffic from 220 visits a day to over 500 a day in less than a month:

That’s why I chose to build an authority site in one of the most competitive and risqué self-help niches out there.

And set myself a goal to turn it into a $9K/pm authority site in just 90 days!

It has now been 147 days since the site went live on 17 Dec, 2013.

Is it earning $9K/pm yet?

Not quite yet, but if we’re talking traffic I’m excited to say that after 3 months of failing to build any serious traction to the site…

…it is finally happening!

Despite the niche being dominated by authoritative “rank-hogs” like Wikipedia, Huffington Post, Men’s Health and YouTube, (because no-one else can get quality links to their site), I’ve found a way to outrank everyone.

And FAST!

In just one month I’ve increased the site’s traffic from 220 visitors a day to 500+ and climbing:

…am on track to rank #1 for the most sought after keyword in the niche – a “how-to” keyword that gets over 8,100 exact searches per month:

And in the last week the site has made an average of $75 a day in ClickBank commissions! YAY!

Don’t get me wrong. Getting to this stage has NOT been easy.

I’ve experienced A LOT of failure along the way and today I’m going to share my experience with you.

Seriously, no matter how impossible a niche may seem there’s ALWAYS a way!

Choose a Tweet and click the bird to share!

500+ visits a day and ranking FAST! Authority site case study

Learn how I turned 220 visitors a day into 500 a day in 30 days

First, I’m going to give you a short and sweet summary of everything that happened before we launched the site on 17 Dec 2013.

Oh and make sure you read on, because I’ve got an exciting announcement at the end!

Building an Authority Site from the Ground Up

In October last year I left China shortly after making 50 panda costumes to promote BA’s new Chengdu flight…

…flew to a secret location (with my brother and biz partner) in the French Alps…

Did we launch with a BANG?

I’d spent three days writing and scheduling 1500 targeted emails to promote each of the 16 posts.

These 16 posts included 4 power pages, 2 of which were important infographics.

After sending just 200 of the 1500 emails, I received an email from Google Apps saying my email account had been blocked for 24 hours because of spam.

The remaining 1300 emails I’d scheduled NEVER reached their recipients and were sucked into a black hole

Since the success of the launch all hinged on email outreach, as you can probably guess, the launch tanked.

The only thing I had to fall back on was Facebook promoted posts and our friends sharing the blog.

Imagine how crushing it it felt after working 18-hour days for 2 months to create a site that barely even caused a ripple when it launched?!

Lesson Learned: If you’re sending in bulk, make sure you use a server like SMTP to send your emails through different IPs. Also, be sure to use alias accounts and to not host those email accounts on Gmail!

Unfortunately we used Google Apps for all our email hosting and paid the price.

So don’t make the same mistake as we did to ensure your important emails get delivered!

How we picked ourselves up: the quiet before the storm

Following the failure of the launch, between December and early February I focussed on building links to the infographics and two other power pages whilst plotting the next move.

There was little chance of getting links from people within the niche, because as I explained above, NO-ONE links out in this niche (it’s VERY risqué and highly competitive).

For example, just the other day a fan of our site linked to us from a competitor’s forum. The link was taken down within hours.

So I tried to build links in adjacent markets.

But after sending hundreds of emails, I only managed to build a small handful of links, which had VERY little impact on traffic:

It was puzzling. The site had 4 AMAZING power pages yet no-one was interested in linking to them?!

The Little Big Horn Strategy is simple: publish TWO expert roundups parallel to one another and then create an infographic from the results.

The idea was that it would create content with huge viral potential and cause a Viral Tsunami.

It took some pretty hard grafting, but in total, 53 experts took part and the result was three epic power pages with huge viral potential.

Here’s what happened after the roundups went live:

YES, the posts brought in a ton of traffic, but these waves are not impressive at all.

When you consider the fact these were two MASSIVE expert roundups launched at the same time these results are VERY disappointing!

And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just sit back and expect the experts to share. I sent HUNDREDS of targeted emails, paid for Facebook promoted posts and even two press releases.

In fact, the ONLY reason these waves of traffic reached the levels they did was because they were manipulated by me.

The first wave only grew so large after I asked one of the experts to share a link to the roundup on Reddit. I then paid a couple of people on Fiverr to upvote the hell out of it!

I did the exact same thing to create the second wave, except this time I had to pay a Redditor to submit the link, because no-one else would!

So, after the Reddit traffic died down only 4/53 of the experts posted a link to the posts on their blogs/Facebook pages. That was it.

The two roundups and infographic between them, only generated a total of 150 Facebook Likes and about 70 Tweets. Ouch.

Yes, traffic saw a small increase to 150 visits a day and I at least had 3 AMAZING new power pages to promote, but seriously, the roundups should have done a lot better.

It just didn’t make any sense?! No-one was sharing?!

And then it hit me.

After scratching my head and emailing back and forth with one of the experts I finally got to the root of the problem.

The brand name was UN-SHAREABLE.

I asked some friends to tell me the brutal truth and they said the exact same thing: “Yeah, you wouldn’t want your friends seeing it on Facebook. Sorry :S”

Well thanks for telling me guys!

So what did I do?

I accepted we’d failed on the branding, bought a new domain name and rebranded. (This was March 20th).

Thankfully we didn’t lose any organic traffic over the whole domain name change fiasco (thanks to my mate Aaron Hawkins who walked me through the whole thing) and on April 10th I was itching to start link building again!

With the new brand in the bag I held my breath and commenced email outreach!

Only this time…

After just a few hours of outreach with the new brand name I noticed an INSTANT change in the way people responded.

It turned out branding was EVERYTHING.

Within days I had managed to land a link on a competitor’s home page widget:

And three highly contextual links on three very relevant pages (all strangely PR3).

I kept reaching out, building links…

…and took two of the power pages (one roundup and one list post) from Google’s third page, to page one in less than two weeks!

Then, in a matter of days, bit by bit I watched the two power pages slowly but surely clambr up the rankings.

I’m pretty confident Google is rewarding our best pages for average time spent on page:

Because even after I STOPPED building links the power pages continued to rise up the rankings.

You see, once you get an unbeatable resource on Google’s first page, if people spend longer reading it, Google will reward it with rank:

Well that’s what I think anyway

The site is continuing to rise up Google FAST and I’m confident when I update you on its progress in a month or two’s time I’ll have smashed through the 1000 daily visits mark!

IMPORTANT: I’m going to share the EXACT techniques I used to rank the site in my next post so make sure you don’t miss out by signing up below!

But how much is it making?!

Sales have only just started picking up so I’m going to wait a while before sharing exact figures.

But now it’s ranking for some pretty decent keywords I’ll be able to focus more of my time on CRO and ranking some of the commercial intent keywords higher.

The reason the site is only making an average of $75 a day at present is because the power page keywords are NOT money/product/review keywords with commercial intent.

Luckily though, two of the product review posts are balancing between Google’s first and second page in #10 and #11 place:

So I’m hoping to rank these by pumping more links to the power pages and filtering that link juice through to them.

A rising tide lifts all boats!

Hopefully, when I come back with an update in a month’s time we’ll see these review posts a little higher in the SERPs.

So what can you learn from this?

Don’t be afraid to fail.

Be persistent.

And NEVER give up.

Exciting Announcement!

Sure, we’ve still got a LONG way to go and working on the site’s conversion rate optimisation is the next priority!

Before the announcement, please Tweet this post if you enjoyed it:

500+ visits a day and ranking FAST! Authority site case study

Learn how I turned 220 visitors a day into 500 a day in 30 days

And now for the announcement…

Next week I’m going to be releasing the first in a series of “over the shoulder” video tutorials where I’ll be building backlinks to one of my niche sites.

It’ll be completely open book and we’re going to cover a HUGE range of broken link building strategies in step by step walkthrough style!

I recently spent a week with the link building team at Distinctly Digital in London perfecting my methods for this video series, so a BIG shoutout and thank you to Aaron, Dan, Jon and Tom for an amazing experience!

Are you in a niche that's so damn competitive no one's willing to link to you?

If so, the Little Big Horn strategy of link building might just be your answer.

Read on if you:

Are in a highly competitive niche
Struggle to get links from blogs within your niche
Want to outrank your competition quickly with white hat SEO
Want to know how to create a VIRAL TSUNAMI[Continue Reading...]

This post is the latest update from my adventure to build a $9K/pm authority site and in it I’ll share how I’m using the Little Big Horn strategy of link building to get my new site shared by A-listers and create a Viral Tsunami.

If you read my last post Viral Carrots & Conversion Rabbit Holes you’ll know my aim was to make my new site go viral on launch day by promoting “viral carrots” (content that has potential to go viral) to the right people.

The goal was to attract links and shares from A-list bloggers both within and closely related to the niche.

Well on 17th December 2013, the site went live and I emailed a large chunk of the A-list bloggers from my little black book of 1000+ contacts.

But did they share it?

No.

Freight Train Out of Nowhere

To cut a long story short, the site failed to create the waves I hoped it would and like a freight train out of nowhere it hit me – this niche is going to be tougher than I thought.

Nevertheless, I was prepared for this and didn’t base my entire strategy on becoming the next best thing since BuzzFeed overnight.

I knew it was going to be a struggle to get links and shares from people within the niche, which is why I’m using the Little Big Horn strategy to make a stand and:

Get white hat links from A-listers

Outrank my competitors FAST

The Little Big Horn Strategy

In the movie, The Social Network, when Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin meet Sean Parker for lunch they explain how they used the Little Big Horn Strategy to attract students from Baylor (a college that already had their own social network) to Facebook, by putting Facebook on the campuses of all the schools within 100 miles of Baylor first:

To implement the Little Big Horn strategy for a new site, you first need assets you can leverage to attract juicy white-hat links from beyond the constrictions of your niche, in adjacent markets.

This way, it doesn’t matter if people within your niche aren’t willing to share your stuff in the first few weeks because you can always get links elsewhere.

The Little Big Horn Strategy is split into two key phases:

Phase One – Get links and exposure from adjacent markets

Phase Two – Get A-listers to share your content

I’ve almost completed Phase One by leveraging a certain type of asset that attracts white-hat links on drip feed from adjacent markets.

Phase One: Leverage Infographics

Infographics make excellent link bait and if promoted the right way, attract a heap of traffic, attention and links.

For this reason I decided to invest in creating not one, but two epic infographics to promote the blog and build links for Phase One.

And these aren’t just any old infographics.

The subject matter is 100% original because I collected the data myself from a 20 question survey sent out to 100 people using Survey Monkey.

Once the data was in hand, I used Lucid Chart to map the flow of how I wanted the infographics to look to save money on infographic designer costs, which only came to USD225 per infographic (on PeoplePerHour.com).

Since the day of the site’s launch I have been submitting them to various infographic directories and reaching out to dozens of people in adjacent markets.

He shared a strategy David Gross’ team from Inter Greater used to get their infographic way more attention than it would have if they’d only reached out to people within the niche.

As well as reaching out to a more diverse crowd of people, Brian also suggested you offer to write a unique introduction for each person – this way they’ll be more likely to share them, since you’ve made their job that much more easy.

I’ve done this and the response has been fantastic:

Actually, because no-one in my niche is using infographics (but mainly use links from black hat SEO / grey hat SEO to rank) I’ve decided to invest in creating one new infographic every month, because after only 3 weeks of going live, the link juice from the infographics has helped our best money page rise up the SERP and appear on Google’s second page!

The funny thing is, that money page has NO external inbound links. So…how the heck is it ranking already?

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

I discovered that a rising tide lifts all boats when a couple of my older posts on clambr started ranking in the SERP after my expert roundup about the best SEO tools for link building went a little viral.

But what I did do was improve clambr’s inner link structure by sending link juice from my “star” pieces of content, to other pieces of content on the site.

I’m doing the exact same thing for my new niche site.

I’ve made sure the current star pieces of content (my two infographics) are sending link juice to my most important money pages.

That’s why one of my best money pages is already appearing on Google’s second page.

Now comes the final push: create a Viral Tsunami that lifts all boats in the harbour.

Remember how when I first launched the site no A-listers would share my content?

Phase Two: Expert Roundups

Now that the site has built up a solid amount of white-hat backlinks and social proof from its’ unique infographics, it’s time to reach out to the A-listers again, only this time, they’ll be more likely to help out.

Why?

Because I’m going to be inviting them to take part in an expert roundup!

If you’ve visited clambr before, you’ll know I’m a bit of an expert at expert roundups

Expert roundups are KICK ASS because they have a habit of going viral since the content is EPIC and the people involved usually share them like crazy which gets you a flood of attention and organic white-hat links:

And if you choose your target keywords wisely, once the social shares and backlinks kick in, you should hit the first page of Google in no time at all:

YES – I strongly believe that social shares play a HUGE factor in ranking content.

And because I’m so confident in the results roundups create, I’d be nuts not to use an expert roundup as Phase Two of the Little Big Horn strategy of link building.

Even if a lot of the experts in my niche are still unwilling to get involved in a roundup, it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to:

Reach out to lesser known experts in the niche who’ll be more up for getting involved (thanks to Matt Gratt from BuzzStream for suggesting this)

Create a question that can be answered by experts outside my niche (not just those strictly confined to the niche)

This will mean I have a larger list of people to reach out to and thus, ensure a greater amount of responses (quantity is key because the more people = the more shares & exposure)

So even if the A-listers don’t get involved the first time round, I’ve still accomplished the task of getting on their radar simplybecause I am asking for their expert opinion.

And when the roundups go viral, the experts who don’t take part will be swept up in the Viral Tsunami, visit my site and be GAGGING to get involved next time round.

Viral Tsunami

A Viral Tsunami is a wave of social shares so vast and wide, that A-listers and Authoritative news sites can’t do anything but get swept up in it.

This will then bring a Tsunami of visitors to your site, which you can then funnel down channels (links) leading to whatever other content you want lifted as it ploughs through.

To create a Viral Tsunami you need to merge two huge waves of traffic together, to create one gigantic wave.

To achieve this, you don’t just launch one expert roundup and promote it like crazy.

No.

You publish 2 expert roundupsat the same time.

The expert roundups should also be on the same or similar topic so people involved in each roundup will be dying to see what the other group of experts said too.

Think about it.

If you and a friend were arrested on suspicion of vandalising a police car and then split up and interviewed in separate rooms you’d wish you could hear what your friend was saying about you right? Did he stick to the story you both agreed upon or did he rat you out? That’d drive you crazy right?!

Here’s some examples of how you could split groups up to pave the way for a Viral Tsunami:

Not only will this urge experts from each roundup to check out the other one, and share those too, but it will also:

Double your site’s exposure (because you can tap into the different variety of followers from each group of experts)

Increase each visitor’s time on site (great for SEO)

Allow you to direct waves of visitors to another fresh piece of content you want to rank (e.g. my money page stuck on Google’s second page)

But it gets better…

…As well as bouncing two expert roundups off each other, I’m also going to publish a unique infographic that compiles the data from both roundups to create an ultimate guide.

Imagine if you were one of the experts who’s answer contributed to the creation of an amazing andunique infographic?

You’d love it right? Because it would feel like your infographic.

In fact, you’d love it so much you’d share it like crazy and probably even publish it on your own blog.

So…this will in turn, give the infographic a huge chance of going viral, attract a ton of links and hopefully rank it for its own target keyword.

As part of my monetization strategy I’m also going to link to the money page I mentioned earlier in this post (the one that’s ranking on the second page of Google), because remember, a rising tide lifts all boats!

The impact of the Viral Tsunami should hopefully provide me with two expert roundups, one infographic and one money page that dominate the SERP.

In effect, this strategy could potentially kill 4 birds with 2 stones.

Since the web is rife with biased reviews and conflicting information, this post was made to give blogging newbies a straight up answer to one of the most important questions we all face from the get go:

Whether you’re a blogging newbie on a tight budget, or an internet superstar living it up in the cloud, we can all relate to that one scary thing – how overwhelming blogging is when you first start out.

Since the web is rife with biased reviews and conflicting information, this post was made to give blogging newbies a straight up answer to one of the most important questions we all face from the get go:

“How do I promote my blog?”

To answer this question, I asked dozens of expert bloggers, affiliate marketers and SEOs to reveal what you really need to promote your blog by asking them a simple question:

“If you could only use 3 tools to promote your blog which 3 would you choose?”

So without further ado, here are the tools the experts highly recommend you use:

BuzzStream, voted #2 best tool for promoting your blog, was also voted the #1 tool for link building here.

Read on to discover each expert’s favourite 3 tools along with their awesome tips on how to use them! You can either skip to your favourite expert using these quick links or grab a coffee, get comfortable and commence scrolling!

How To Promote Your Blog with Just 3 Tools

If I had the budget for only 3 tools to start promoting my blog all over again…

1. MailChimp – you’ll hear it over a million times from the biggest and best internet marketers but the money is all in your mailing list. Every blog you start should have some way of capturing leads to move visitors down your sales funnel, I hope you have thought about your monetisation strategy before you start your blog!

The reason I would choose Mailchimp over AWeber especially as a beginner is that their free-plan allows you to have up to 2,000 members for free.

Sadly on the free plan that means you can’t setup an autoresponder but if you are just starting it out a free mailing list allows you to test your strategy without additional overheads.

2. BuzzStream – I’ve actually only just started using BuzzStream – shocking I know – but their basic plan is more than sufficient to get you started. There are other CRM’s on the market but for a complete n00b BuzzStream is easy to pick up and will help you to keep in touch with all the power users in your niche easily.

Building a network of people who can amplify your content in what ever way, shape or form is a must.

3. Trello – this might surprise some people but having a work flow in place really helps you to stay focused and on task.

Most bloggers have a day job or a business and their blog is either a hobby or future income source. Trello is free to use and means that when you have a couple of hours to work on your blog you can tick off the tasks and/or add some new tasks.

As your blog grows you might want to outsource smaller tasks e.g. basic maintenance such as checking for broken links, to VA’s so having a process management tool in place will make life easier here.

Essential, then, is Rapportive, for discovering the emails of the people I want to contact. BuzzStream surely is of great help, even though I use it for more complex link building campaigns.

Then, being me quite present in our Industry spaces, I tend to be mentioned, therefore using tools like Mention, the Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer or Topsy is of great help for discovering those mentions and so, eventually, reclaiming for a link while thanking for citing me.

Quite different is when I work on client’s site. In that case, Buzzstream, Buffer (coupled with Bitly) and Followerwonk/Simply Measured are my basic set of tools.

If I could only choose three tools to use to promote ZacJohnson.com, I would focus on the following:

AWeber / Constant Contact / MailChimp – It doesn’t matter who you are using as a mailing host provider, as long as you are collecting their email. The majority of people will leave your site and never come back. Getting them to join your mailing list is the best way to monetize your blog and brand for long term results.

Twiends – Twitter and social networking is massive. Twiends can help you grow your following fast while also eliminating foreign traffic and bots. Free and premium services available.

PopUp Domination / OptinMonster – Two great tools for building pop up forms on your blog to get people to take immediate action and join your mailing list. They are annoying on the first visit, but they work extremely well.

2. BuzzStream, to find bloggers and other contacts in my niche. But also to help manage ALL of my contacts. This tool is great for contact management.

3. Moz Analytics, because this tool comes with full access to Open Site Explorer, Fresh Web Explorer, and more. Plus all the benefits of the analytics tool like ranking reports, on-page SEO tools, social media tools, etc.

I think that with these three tools one could really build up an online presence and could generate a ton of earned traffic, which would include organic search, social and referral traffic. Of course the tool is only as good as the user and you would need to come up with creative content ideas and story ideas to pitch influencers with in order for this to work.

The first tool I’d choose is a WordPress blog. It’s easy to get everything setup, and anytime you want to make changes/add something, all you have to do is search for the right plugin. Even for a non-techie like me, it’s easy to have a good-looking, well-functioning way to interact with my target audience anytime I want. (And, since it’s connected right to my domain, I get “credit” from Google for fresh content every time I post something new on it.)

The next tool I would choose is Google Analytics. Yes, there are better tools out there, and Google definitely angered alot of people (including myself!) by listing “not provided” in the keyword column. However, it’s free and easy to check every day. I like to have a general idea of where my traffic is coming from, and Analytics gives me that. (I also check my Bluehost control panel to get some additional visitor info.) I’ve found more guest blogging opportunities that way (for example, if a site I’ve never heard of picks up one of my articles, I know they’re interested in my niche, so I can offer them future posts).

I think that’s about it for tools. I don’t use anything to automate/manage my social media profiles. Personally, I like to handle Twitter, Google+, etc. myself to give my profiles a “personal” touch. I used AWeber when I first got into business (and liked it). I would have happily stuck with it, but I discovered that people weren’t all that interested in a content writing newsletter. Instead of learning how to write better, they simply wanted to hire me to do the work for them! In other niches, though, Aweber would be a gold mine.

OK – if I was just starting out and launching ContentHarmony.com from scratch, I wouldn’t pay for any tools. Tools are meant to speed up a process, and if you’re just starting out you probably don’t have a process OR a large budget to speed up your nonexistent process.

I’d invest whatever promotional money I had into an expense account and start meeting people in the industry for beer or coffee. I’d spend the rest of the time creating content that’s formatted differently from everything else getting published in the industry, and preferably write about new topics and especially tactics that haven’t been covered well.

With that said, a free MailChimp account, a free Meetup.com account, and a handful of free Ubersuggest queries can keep you going a long time when it comes to promoting, networking, and creating content.

If I were somehow forced to only use 3 tools to promote Sparring Mind, they would definitely be the following:

1. AWeber: I’ve often considered turning my blogs into ‘newsletter only’ content; that’s how confident I am in email. There are many, many options here, but AWeber makes a great product for email marketing, and their team is great!

2. Yesware: I send a lot of email, and although Yesware is ‘Email for Salespeople’, when I’m promoting my content I’m really selling in a way. The features you get are a must for email aficionados who dabble in self-promotion.

3. FollowUp.cc: Staying in touch with people is one of the best ways to grow a blog. Although networking should be natural, it be nice to get a little nudge as a reminder to check in with someone, and FollowUp.cc allows you to do just that.

1. Triberr – I get an incredible amount of social engagement on my blog and part of that is thanks to Triberr, it allows me to join tribes of bloggers that are interested in the same things as me and create tribes too. When I become a member in a tribe it means that my blogs content goes through to the ‘Tribal streams’ of the other bloggers in that tribe putting it right in front of them ready to share. The great thing is that Triberr is full of social media influencers and highly engaged users that are more likely to share across multiple platforms and comment on your content. This has helped me scale social engagement and traffic. I wrote a guide on how some of the advanced features work here. What the creators of Triberr (Dan & Dino) have done for bloggers and social media fanatics has simply incredible and most importantly – it gets results.

2. SEM Rush – SEO is my specialty and so I have been using SEM Rush for a good while now, it helps me not only get the competitive edge but also figure out topic ideas that will actually get traffic.

3. Social Oomph – While I am a huge fan of Buffer and Hootsuite, they just don’t allow scheduling at the type of scale that Social Oomph does. I upload a text file of my most popular/evergreen blog posts and run them through the tool every so often to keep people coming back to my older blog posts. I can tweak these updates so they go out at reasonable times. I talked at more detail about this in a recent review but the set of features is mind blowing. Social Oomph supports all the major social networks (apart from Google+, but it’s a similar story with most tools), unlimited accounts, account delegation, in depth analytics and powerful scheduling functionality. It is a paid tool and works out around $26 per month but the amount of time it saves more than makes up for it. Referrals from Twitter increased around 150% when I started using Social Oomph.

I’d use Twitter (Tweetdeck still works for me, though really like Meshfire too). BuzzStream is on the list for finding, connecting with prospects, and organizing 1:1 promotions. I would (and do) use Adwords as well. If I had a fourth choice, I’d probably add Wistia.

My answer really ties in to the three platforms I’ve had most success with – so they aren’t strictly tools but they have done the most to drive traffic to my blog.

The first would be Twitter. I’m a relative newcomer to Twitter but it’s been a revelation to me in terms of how responsive and targeted the visitors can be. There’s some really creative ways to use Twitter, and despite having had some success with it, I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface.

The second is AWeber and direct emails. Having a mailing list and a lead magnet is obviously a must – but I’m also getting a fantastic response from directly emailing influential people in my niche to create roundup posts – just as you are doing with this one. You can’t just do it blind though, there’s lots of research that goes into the process first. I learned this following your example and Brian Dean’s advice over at Backlinko.

The third part of my answer has to be podcasting. I know this is cheating a bit, but the tools of interest here are mainly iTunes, Stitcher Radio and Libsyn. I learned about podcasting from Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income and John Lee Dumas at Entrepreneur on Fire. I now get as much traffic to my podcast as I do to my blog – and this platform is actually so successful I’ve even thought about making Content Champion just a podcast, as this single source is where I get most of my visitors from.

Infusionsoft happens to be what I use for email marketing, but any email marketing tool would do. Email is one of my most important channels. It’s where all of my most engaged and most enthusiastic readers and customers come from.

HootSuite, because that’s what I use for what little social media activity I add to my promotions.

Wistia isn’t strictly a promotion tool, but videos are extremely important for my business and Wistia takes care of all the video encoding and delivery and all that stuff for me. This frees up my time to just focus on creating awesome products and awesome content.

Hmmm, three “tools”. I’d have to go with would be an email list provider (either AWeber or MailChimp), getting featured by other people on their blog or social media (not really a tool per say, more of a network), and spending more than five minutes on the headline so it spreads on its own.

I’ve not done a lot of promotion of my site to date: IMAlwaysHappy2Help.com so mostly it’s been organic and accidental traffic that has found it through its content and on-page SEO. When I feel it has sufficient content on the site to be worth promoting more I’ll start with Facebook promoted ads to give it the kick start it deserves, targeting like minded people who value their freedom and work or want to work online.

The 3 tools I use to promote my side project/blog to date are my personal twitter account – follow me at: perrytheimp, a Facebook page, “Like” us at: https://www.facebook.com/HappyInternetLifestyle and BuzzStream.

When I’m going to promote an important piece of content, I generally go with Viral Content Buzz for a boost in social sharing, Buffer to schedule posts to go out across different networks at the best times, and AWeber to get the attention of my mailing list. The latter seems to be the most effective in getting engagement in the form of comments, especially when I specifically ask people to come by and comment.

I would choose AWeber, HootSuite and Long Tail Pro. I know that Long Tail Pro is more of a research tool for indirect promotion and visibility in the search engines, but it was hard to come up with a 3rd.

I use a lot of management tools and plugins, but you just made me realize how I don’t really use a lot of “promotion” tools per say. LOL

If I can only use 3 tools to promote my blog, I think I’ll probably choose these:

Google Analytics – to determine which channels (traffic sources, sites, etc…) are driving the most visibility and conversions, so I can allocate more effort on them (since they are the ones proven to really work).

MailChimp – I’m currently using this for my email marketing campaigns, and so far so good. I’ve been really satisfied with their service.

HootSuite – I’ve been using Buffer for quite some time now, but for far more extensive campaigns, I’ll definitely go with this one.

2. LinkedIn – Most people think that Facebook is the ultimate traffic machine when in fact, it depends on your blog’s topics and audience. In the case of iJustDid.org, most of my traffic comes from LinkedIn as my articles are relevant to both professionals and businesses.

3. RebelMouse – We’re seeing users increase in traffic in their blogs through RebelMouse and I also use it to syndicate my posts further and get maximum exposure.

Twitter – One would wonder, how twitter could be used as a tool. Well, I consider and love to use Twitter as a tool. It is like a short-cut way to promote my site. It is the best platform to build influential and strong connections, and the best part is that they give you only 140 characters to promote yourself. It is a challenge and a boon as well to promote your site to a number of people in short. Also, it helps in making your message loud and clear.

BuzzStream – If you are looking for some of the best link prospecting aspects, you simply couldn’t afford to miss this one. After creating a campaign, there is a sureshot and easy way to build quality links which you could get with the help of this tool. It helps you in getting all those relevant sites on which you could build quality links. It is quite swift in getting links from various industry niches.

Buffer – This tool has completely lessened the efforts of promoting a content on social media. One simply needs to upload the content and schedule when they want it to be posted on Facebook and Twitter. It helps in promoting various content rather quickly. Anyone looking out for serious social media promotion efforts, is definitely going to love this tool.

I don’t tend to use that many tools in general, but if I had to choose 3 to use, I’d choose the following:

1. BuzzStream. It makes outreach incredibly easy and fast, plus the team are all very responsive and nice about questions. I truly think those guys want to know what their users want, and they want to incorporate that into their product.

2. Viral Content Buzz. You can get retweeted, Facebooked, pinned, stumbled, etc. and it’s a very intuitive system that I’ve found drives a lot of traffic.

3. Twitter. Just plain, simple, web-version Twitter. I don’t like scheduled tweets and I can get very overwhelmed when I use any of the cool platforms like Hootsuite. I think they’re fantastic for people who don’t get completely distracted by something else like I do and if you’re managing a few streams they can be invaluable, but they overload me so I just use boring old web Twitter.

I’m going to give you what may seem like three pretty uninspiring tools, but the simple fact is that you don’t need anything more advanced to create a successful blog. These are the three most important tools I use when it comes to promoting Leaving Work Behind:

1. Chrome (or your web browser of choice). The main way in which I promote my site is by establishing relationships with other bloggers. I find these bloggers by browsing the web: through Google, social media, and so on. The relationships I build often lead to mutual promotion — mentions on other sites, on social media, and so forth.

2. Gmail (or your email client of choice). Of course, you need a way to get in touch with these bloggers, and email is still the daddy. The key is to reach out to people who you are genuinely interested in knowing (rather than reaching out with the hope that you’ll get something out of it).

3. AWeber. This is the only premium product I would recommend as in my opinion, an email marketing manager is essential for blogging. AWeber’s the best I’ve used.

Remarketing on Google Display Network: This isn’t free. But it’s key because when you start out a blog, you’ll have a very low repeat visitor rate since you haven’t yet built up a brand for yourself. By tagging people with a cookie and reminding them of your company, it will help build brand recall which will translate into having a more engaged audience.

Google Docs: Blogging is collaborative. At WordStream, we have different people who work on keyword research, article research, blogging, copy-editing, and even pitching the content to media contacts. Google docs and spreadsheets is how we coordinate the vast majority of those efforts, and the best part is that it’s free.

Twitter: Back when I first launched the WordStream blog, we spent a ton of time (and still do) on twitter, engaging with thought leaders in our industry. Even though you probably want your new blog to be about you and your point of view, you’re way better off listening to what other people have to say first and curating that content on your blog. Twitter is the easiest way to do this. If you’re not already an established superstar in your industry, the key is to take an interest in other people’s blogs first, and only after that will people start to take an interest in your blog.

1. Ahrefs – Ahrefs would be a big part of my promotional strategy, because till date some of the best links I’ve built for my serious sites was through the help of Ahrefs. It shows you pretty accurately the backlink profiles of similar content on the web to what you’re going to publish or have just published. So, when I’m beating my competition in terms of content quality, I can surely grab better links too. But for that my content piece first needs to get noticed. So, I’d start off with trying to bag links from some pages/sites that are already linking to my competitors’ contents. So, when I have confidence in my own content, I can easily go ahead and let the owners of those sites know about it. More often than not I am able to grab those links. So, they give me the initial link juice that’s required to hit the first one or two pages of Google, and that’s when I start getting organic traffic from Google, as I mostly am able to rank for medium to high keywords that way. So, it gives me a peace of mind, which allows me to be involved in more serious outreach or other promotional activities. So, if you look all the way back, if Ahrefs didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be able to achieve what I did.

2. Google Analytics – I guess it’s a pretty fundemental tool that you can’t miss out on. Without being able to see your top performing pages in terms of visits and conversions (if you actually have conversion goals) you’re just missing a whole lot out on anticipation. If you see some pages perform a lot better than some others, you instantly know what type of content you need to produce next. The vast amount of features that Google Analytics offers for free is hard to ignore. Even though it wouldn’t give you much insights on keyword rankings or keyword data which something like Moz Analytics or some other paid alternatives would, it still provides a whole bunch of useful data you can always get ideas from seeing.

3. MailChimp – Choosing the third was relatively harder for me. I had to choose between BuzzStream and MailChimp. I chose the latter because, first of all it’s free (for upto 12,000 emails and 400 list subscribers per month). Secondly, it’s capable of emailing more than one person at a time and offers nice and easy to use HTML templates, and you can rely on it being assured about the deliverability rates. BuzzStream on the other hand is really great for personalizing your emails, keeping up with the connections and replies. Finding contact informations from poorly structured websites and stuff. But, the introductory cost of $19/mo for their solo plan might put off many beginners out there. They don’t even spend that much on the web servers. Building an email list is very easy with MailChimp and it’s a very effective long-term investment too, in my opinion. So, as long as you’re ready to handle some manual email exchanges and email outreach yourself, you should think long-term and start getting people to subscribe to your email list.

That’s a bit of a tricky question. What we would use right now at Firepole Marketing is different than what we would recommend to someone just starting out a new business, or who is at a different point in their growth.

Right now, the tools we use the most to promote Firepole Marketing are Office Autopilot, which handles all of our emails and membership access, Facebook, which houses our hugely popular Student and Alumni group, and GoToWebinar, where we host all of the webinars with our affiliate partners.

This being said – other than webinars and guest posts, we don’t do a lot of outbound promotion right now. We’re considering new ways to expand our reach and connect with more people online, and so in a few months, we may have a totally different technologies at work for us.

For a new blogger, now I would definitely recommend AWeber to handle your emails and your opt-ins – it’s a great entry level product with the features you need to start building a list. Other technologies we happily recommend to people are ReplyMe, which is a wordpress plugin that lets people subscribe to comments, so they can continue the conversation. Another would be Visual Website Optimizer, which lets you easily split test different variations on your landing pages, and throughout the rest of your site.

Of course, when it comes to promotion, always be aware that the most important thing to consider is what your audience uses and needs from you. If they love to comment on your blog posts, devote time to finding the tools that will make that process seamless and pleasant. If they get all of their news from Twitter – then HootSuite can be a great way to manage your interactions with them there. Think about the methods of engagement that matter most to your readers, and do everything you can to make that process as effective as possible.

As an online marketer I’m very aware of how important social media tools are in regards to marketing. I have three vital platforms all bloggers must use in order to increase their chances of success, Blog Engage, Hootsuite and Dlvr.it.

Blog Engage allows you to connect with other like minded bloggers and helps increase your blog reach. It’s simply the best place to drive real blog traffic and to general a larger subscriber list. Also, Blog Engage is a social media syndication platform; you connect with blogger while it does the rest of the work for you.

HootSuite is also one of my most productive platforms for content distribution. It allows me to increase my reach to all my social networks while maintaining a scheduled process. I’ve seen a lot of great success come from marketing in Facebook groups and Hootsuite has a lot to do with it.

Dlvr.it is a great platform that allows me to set up my important feeds and it distributes my content to the social media profiles without me doing anything. It’s a great system and once set up does all the work for you. As a blog community owner and blogger I know the importance of being productive and efficient.

These tools allow me to increase my online income. I strongly recommend Blog Engage, Hootsuite and Dlvr.it to all bloggers looking to improve their online presence and blog traffic.

First tool is AWeber, for sure – or any other email software service. You need to “capture” the traffic you send to your blog, so that you can “use” it again and again.

Second tool is Flare – or Digg Digg – which allows people to share your content easily. Your content may be great, but if it’s not easily shareable, it won’t get a big exposure.

Third tool is Google Analytics: before you can start promoting your blog, you need to understand what’s working and what isn’t. For example, you don’t want to waste your days on Twitter if it’s driving little traffic to your blog.

What tools I use depends on several factors, including industry and type of promotion. I don’t use any tools at all for Cucumber Nebula, so I’d rather discuss what tools we’ve been using at Skinny Limits.

BuzzStream: Outreach is difficult and a pain in the ass to manage. Especially when you’re reaching out to bloggers, where each and every email has to be personalized in order to get an efficient link acceptance rate. BuzzStream is a huge help in this front. Their newish, Buzzbar feature has helped us massively speed up our outreach process by allowing us to send individual emails to every blogger much more efficiently.

Followerwonk: I’m a huge advocate for finding people on Twitter. If someone has a large Twitter following, they likely have a large overall following across other networks. This doesn’t hold as much truth on other social networks. Sometimes they have a large following solely on the one network. I find Followerwonk to be a great help in finding people with a solid Twitter following. My one complaint, is there’s bit of repetition. You have to get creative with your search terms to avoid running into the same bloggers over and over.

Wistia: I’m still new to Wistia, so I can’t say a whole lot, however some of the data they provide for video hosting is pretty spectacular; especially for landing pages. You can see how far along a video played before people bail, or click a CTA. There’s also some email integration to collect emails after it plays through. I haven’t used the later feature yet, but there’s a lot of opportunity there depending on the type of video promotion. All in all, this is a tool I’m excited about diving deeper into.

E-mail – Probably the most basic tool but also a very important one. E-mail is the best way to build relationships with influencers (excluding actually meeting them in person). It allows you to move the conversation to a more personal setting.

Streak – A very cool but not that popular tool I discovered a while ago. Helps sort your emails and contacts into boxes directly in Gmail. You can add notes to your contacts that show up when you receive an E-mail from them. So if you get an E-mail from someone you haven’t head from in over a year, the notes will help you remember exactly who they are. This description doesn’t do Streak justice. It’s capable of a lot more.

Topsy – Topsy allows you to sort through tweets to find key influencers you should connect with. You can find out who tweeted a certain post, or who’s tweeting certain terms. Works very well together with Bit.ly.

2. Market Samurai – Best all in one keyword research and competitor analysis tool I have found. The most powerful feature by far is the SEO Competition module. This allows you to easily reverse link engineer the top 10 ranked sites for your keywords.

3. WordPress – Powerful free CMS that ticks all the boxes in terms of ease of use, customisation and functionality. It really makes the optimisation of your site a breeze.

If I could only use 3 tools to promote my website, they would be the following so I can target different promotion elements:

1. Buffer – (social) Buffer is a great tool to manage my social media elements for my branded website.

2. Boomerang – (email) Boomerang would be used to manage my email out reach and email promotional methods with the website.

3. Pinnacle Video Editor – (video) Pinnacle Video editor would be used to roll out video campaigns for my website. I would be able to make Video and Audio promotional content from the tool to use for link building and branding.

I like the ease of use with their autoresponder. With many of our clients, we set up a ten stage autoreponder to engage new or old leads. Constant Contact allows you to upload your list without getting a double opt-in. This works well with established email lists that you already have a relationship with. Once the list goes through the ten stage autoresponder, we are able to segment the emails based on their opens and clicks. This grants us the ability to send out future emails and newsletters based upon their sub-interests.

For social media management, this is our preferred weapon of choice. Their features on engagement are above and beyond the rest of the competition within the space. It is real easy to drill deep down into the analytics for each social channel.

Many of my new clients spend a considerable amount of money on press release services. After I review their analytics, 9 out of 10 of these clients have created a negative ROI from their press release expenditures. At that point, I advise them to let us use HARO to help get them them real press. HARO is not going to generate serious buzz without putting work into it. It may take six months to learn how to work the community, but it will pay recurring dividends once you master it.

1. AWeber – Email marketing is a huge part of my business, as it should be for anyone building a business online. AWeber is easy to use and very reliable. I use it to build relationships with my audience and make offers.

2. Triberr – This is a great web service that allows you to build and join groups of people that can promote your content for you; on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. It’s awesome.

3. iTunes – This isn’t a promotional tool, but it’s a promotion platform that can lead to hundreds and thousands of new people finding out about you and your business. My podcast had been downloaded 169,266 times. These are people I would’ve never reached without iTunes.

If I were to start a new site in a new vertical, I would focus on creating highly differentiated content and promoting it to other sites in that vertical. So I’d need:

– Some Sort of Media Production Tool
Either a camera like a DSLR, Adobe Illustrator, maybe a good video camera and an editing tool, or something else to create highly differentiated content from everyone else in the space. (If everyone’s making blog posts, I want to make videos. If everyone’s making videos, I want to take great pictures. If everyone’s taking great pictures, I want to make illustrations. Etc.)

I’d also make a more permanent software tool if I could, either a free tool like these – http://tools.buzzstream.com/link-building – years after their launch, they still get traffic and rank for competitive keywords. If it was a niche that didn’t fit a free tool, I’d try to make something lightweight and socially shareable like http://calmingmanatee.com/.

– A Round of Adult Beverages at a Blogger or Industry Meetup –
The best place to build relationships with influencers in your niche is in person. If I could, I would attend a meetup or throw a happy hour for people and bloggers in my space and buy everyone an adult beverage (or 6) of their choosing. I live in Austin, so I can do this at SXSW.

– BuzzStream
Now that I have something cool and have made some new friends, I can use BuzzStream to show it to them. I’d use BuzzStream for ongoing relationship building and outreach for my new, highly differentiated content.

Linkdex: There is not a single day where Verve Search don’t use Linkdex, from link prospecting and link development to proposal and pitches. This platform is awesome!

WooRank: I use WooRank a lot when gauging the value of a page; it has a brilliant layout of all the most important metrics, including social. It’s a Chrome plugin and toolbar as well as a full SEO software. I use the plugin/toolbar regularly.

BuzzStream: At Verve Search we use Buzzstream for link prospecting, there is no other tool that does this quicker. Although a little over complicated, once you get the hang of it you wonder how you “lived without it”

From a blogging perspective if I could only invest in 3 tools they would be:

1. BuzzBundle – My tutorial shows you precisely how I have used BuzzBundle to drive traffic to my site. It is a great piece of software that allows you to monitor the web for a range of terms.

For example if you have a link building tutorial, you can monitor blogs, forums, Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers and all of the major social networks for people that need help with link building. Then just engage them in a conversation and share your tutorial with them. You can do all of this within BuzzBundle and this traffic strategy has been critical to my blog’s success.

2. Google Analytics – This won’t cost you a penny but having the ability to track your visitors and what they do on your site is critical. If you set things up properly you can track affiliate clicks, email subscriptions, social sharing and more! When you know things like that it’s easy to work out where you need to focus your efforts.

Take a look at this custom report I built:

It is quite clear that if I want email subscribers I should focus on YouTube & BlackHatWorld.

You can even use Google Analytics to get more traffic for your blog. Best of all – it’s 100% free!

The 100% free getting things done system uses Evernote and takes less than 10 minutes to learn and start using. Because it uses Evernote it syncs across all of your devices which makes it very handy. I use it to manage my work & personal life.

The way it tags and organises things is superb and you’ll never forget anything again. As well as managing my actions/to do list I use it to clip article ideas & reference material from the web.

I have an IFTTT recipe that automatically creates a new note anytime I mark an article as saved in Feedly. It really is a great system built off the flexibility of Evernote!

If a client calls you out of the blue in less than 5 seconds you can know exactly where you were up to!

Staying organised like this is crucial to success – if you do 1 thing today, start using TheSecretWeapon.

AWeber: The money’s in the list and Aweber makes it (relatively) easy to collect emails and communicate with your list.

Mention.net: The tool I couldn’t live without. Helps me keep track of what conversations are happening around my brand and my niche.

Google Analytics: OK, I REALLY couldn’t live without Google Analytics. How else could I find out where my visitors come from and what they do when they get to my site. Like WordPress, Google Analytics is both free and priceless at the same time.

Atomic Reach: This platform (currently in beta) offers some very cool features, perhaps the most useful being the ability to submit a draft of your content, and it will score that based on your previously selected parameters (so, say you want to reach senior executives in the automotive trade, it will score the content’s tone, language, understanding level, etc, for that type of audience). It then advises what changes should be made to optimize content and tracks its real-time performance once published. It’s a great way to create the kind of content your target audience reads.

Magic Action Box Pro: I’ve just started to use this but the results have been hugely impressive. A list-building plugin for WordPress, it allows you to create standard opt-ins, as well as subscription boxes that have social sharing options, or sales boxes that direct to a sales page/download area after subscription. It even integrates with Gravity Forms for a fully integrated approach to building a list while gathering insights via promos and focus groups/polls, etc.

Buffer: This has been my go-to for intelligent automated sharing since its early days. The fact it can find the most optimal times to send my content out, as well as give me analytics on the type of content picked up the most, helps me tailor even more. Especially when combined with Atomic Reach.

HootSuite would be my #1 choice for promoting thru social media. Hootsuite makes it easy for me to see the things I need to see in one place and manage how and when I send out content. Big time saver for me.

AWeber would be my next favorite tool to promote my blog. Email is still one of the best ways to reach your readers in a more personal way. Plus AWeber is very easy to setup and manage your messages and web forms and even my pop form.

Blog Communities are not really “tools” but for a new blogger, places like BizSugar.com and BlogEngage.com are powerful ways to get your content out there and connect with 100’s of other bloggers.

AWeber – It’s simple. I just love building email lists and AWeber makes it easy for me.

Viral Content Buzz: I believe in good Karma a lot. But the bitter truth is that, even though helping others is a good thing, it doesn’t mean that you’ll get rewards or benefits each and every time. But when it comes to Viral Content Buzz, it keeps the promise alive.

Social Media is a great way to drive high quality traffic and viral content buzz helps us to do that.

It’s important to have active and reasonable Social Network accounts. And Viral Content Buzz helps you to do that by helping you to get social shares at the same time.

Simply – It gets you more people to your website while making your social networks alive.

HootSuite – HootSuite isn’t a single network but it is my tool of choice to coordinate social media communications across all of my social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Tumblr…etc. It is the one that does it all and the Hootsuite Bookmarklet functions in the same way Buffer does except gives you far more networks at your disposal at a slight cost in flexibility on frequency with auto schedule. Hootsuite is one tool I can’t live without.

Blog Engage – Blog Engage recently with their YouTube Syndication brought a huge boost of traffic to my YouTube content which in turn brought sales, advertisers and more visibility into my video reviews, this combined with the fact that I get more retweets per article from Blog Engage on average than Triberr makes this a great network. It takes some investment just like Triberr does and with both of these networks you can’t just expect people to share or publicize your content without you putting some effort into showcasing others as well.

SimplyCast – SimplyCast does for me what Aweber and MailChimp do for others, it allows me to broadcast to my email newsletter of 10,000+ fans. It is cheaper than either of the other 2 platforms when you get to the 5000+ subscriber level and does so much more than mailing lists, though it lacks the RSS support of Aweber. SimplyCast has some great action hooks too for sending new subscribers information, and triggers that can be set on all sorts of conditions in this object oriented map where you drag and drop the triggers/actions you want to happen.

HootSuite – Thissocial management tool doesn’t only help me schedule my status updates for my social profiles but also allows me to track people who mentioned my target keyword. As soon as I have my post published, I can create an alert for my target keyword and regularly check out who mentioned that phrase and start engaging with those Twitter users.

Ahrefs – I use this tool to identify linkers to an existing content that has the same content type like my post. I sort all the potential linkers based on Page Authority (PA) and level of acquisition (how difficult can I acquire a link from the page). I then, craft an email that is personalized for a certain linker and start building a rapport with the linker.

Gmail – I mainly use this tool for outreach. You only need to add some extensions to Gmail to make your outreach more efficient and effective. One is to add Rapportive to see the work position and social profiles of your end-receiver. You will need this to personalize your emails by including his position in your email, i.e. “I know that you are the [Position] at [Company Name] and I wanted to get in touch with you”.

You might want also want to enable “Canned Responses” in the Gmail labs. What I usually do is to create an email template that is designed for a specific outreach campaign (round-up post) and save it in the canned responses.

If you're thinking of launching a new site and want to know how to go viral on the day you launch it, read on.

In this post I'm going to explain how I'll be using BuzzStream to introduce my new authority site to the world with viral carrots that will lure people down conversion rabbit holes.[Continue Reading...]

If you’re thinking of launching a new site and want to know how to go viral on the day you launch it, read on.

In my last post I revealed the exact process I went through to find content holes and craft highly share-able content.

In this post I’m going to explain how I’ll be using BuzzStream to introduce my new authority site to the world with viral carrots that will lure people down conversion rabbit holes.

Viral Carrots

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been beavering away creating 18 epic pieces of content – 12 of which have massive potential to go viral. Let’s call these “viral carrots” (tempting fodder for inquisitive rabbits).

All 18 pieces of content have killer titles, over 50% of them are fun lists and the most informative articles are all at least 1500 words long. Blimey :S

NOTE: Most of the sites in the niche I’m attacking are still writing crappy 500 word articles.

Here’s what the 18 pieces of content will consist of (I’ve included example links to explain what I mean):

As you can see, 12/18 are of the viral variety (LOL lists, Shocking Truth Lists & Infographics). Because these are going to capture a wider audience with not so many wallet-out buyer types, we’ll make sure we direct these people to more light hearted content first, before diverting those truly interested in the niche further down the rabbit hole.

Conversion Rabbit Holes

Here’s the plan for directing rabbits (traffic) down the rabbit hole to eventually land at conversion optimized Product Reviews or the Convincer Article (both of which will have direct links to affiliate products).

These aren’t set in stone, and I’ll probably mix and match a few combinations to see which rabbit holes perform best.

Some bullet points to explain my reasoning behind all this:

The initial 3 products I’ve chosen to promote are all VERY different and targeted towards a niche within the main niche

Because the 3 products are so different, and it is clear they each solve a very different problem, people won’t be conflicted about which to choose

2 products have high gravity on Click Bank, the third product has an amazing video sales funnel

The LOL Lists, Shocking Truth Lists & Infographics are all about subjects related to one of the 3 products (no exceptions)

The LOL Lists will attract a wide audience, many of which won’t buy, but will likely be interested in the Shocking Truth Lists, which they should also be inclined to share too

The aim is to get an audience that wouldn’t usually share LOL Lists & Shocking Truth Lists from this niche, sharing like crazy, so they will attract the audience truly interested in this niche when they see it erupt on social media

With 12 highly share-able pieces of content at the forefront of the site, people will hopefully stay on the site longer and share some of the other stuff. If they’re interested in buying, they’ll hopefully continue down the rabbit hole

So far about 14 articles are in the bag, so once the remaining 2 infographics and 2 articles are done, I’ll begin building the site

Now, you’re probably wondering how the hell I’m going to get an audience to all these articles when the site goes live?

Planting Viral Carrots with BuzzStream

Naturally, I don’t expect for one second that once I hit publish on the blog, swarms of traffic will come rushing in after I simply announce the site launch on Twitter and ask a bunch of friends to like it on Facebook.

No, instead I am working on a predominately email outreach strategy, using BuzzStream, to reach out to every single person interested in the niche.

Here’s exactly who I’m going to reach out to when the site goes live:

All 200 of the primary contacts in the niche to tell them about our new site and suggest an article their followers will like

All the blogs I link out to in each of my 18 pieces of content and thank them for their useful resource (each piece of content has no less than 10 outbound links)

All the sites that have created infographics in the niche before (and some of which I’ve cited to create my own infographics)

All the sites ranking in the top 100 Google results for each of my 18 articles’ target keywords

NOTE: I haven’t included link building (e.g. fixing broken links) above because I’ll need to wait 2-3 days after the launch once all the posts have plenty of social shares and look worthwhile linking to.

So, now I’m going to reveal the process I’ll be using to reach out to groups #1 and #2 in the list above: the 200 primary contacts & the blogs I link out to in my content. (I’ll share deeper insights into the extent of my email outreach in a future post once the site launch is complete and I have more templates and results to share with you).

#1 Email outreach to the 200 primary contacts in the niche

If you read my previous article, you’d have seen that I created a list of 491 potential people to reach out to in the niche. I’ve since whittled this list down to just over 200 contacts who would genuinely be interested in my content and whom I must consider building relationships with. These are the creme de la creme of the niche, the girls and guys who will most likely link to my new site and share it on social media.

I made an excel with organised columns, so that when I upload the contacts to BuzzStream it’ll be easy for me to see who I can reach out to for certain types of posts.

With BuzzStream, you can tag your contacts which makes it easy to find the right people to reach out to with one click. Here are the tags I used:

And here is how I assigned the tags to websites in excel:

Once I’d visited all the sites and assigned tags I saved the file as a CSV file and uploaded to BuzzStream. Because I named the columns the same way as BuzzStream’s fields it matched them up easily:

Now whenever I want to reach out to just the big magazines, I click the big mag tag, and BuzzStream filters all the big mags:

Pretty cool right?

When the site kicks off I’ll make sure I suggest content the 200 primary contacts will like based on their tags. So if they are “Fencers”, (sites that are sitting on the fence) I’ll suggest broader content that they’ve loosely written about in the past. If they are “humour” sites, I’ll suggest the most hilarious of our articles, and so on.

Relationship Building

I have already started building relationships with a small handful of bloggers in the niche. These are predominantly star writers for some of the “big mags”. I chose these people based on how often they are writing about the niche, how many hoards of Twitter followers they have, and also how high the PR of their site is.

I’ve been tracking my interactions with them on the BuzzStream dashboard. Here’s what this looks like (screenshot example is from an expert roundup I’m currently working on for clambr):

When the site launches, I will have hopefully built up a strong enough relationship with these “big mag bloggers” so they’ll share my kickass content with their thousands of followers as soon as I hit them up with a friendly email like this:

So what about the remaining 190 or so primary contacts?

Because I don’t have time to build relationships with everyone, on the day of the launch I’ll email the remaining 190 or so contacts with something simple like this:

All 12 of my viral carrots will be dispersed evenly among these contacts. I will NOT promoteany of the Helpful Articles, Convincer Articles or Product Reviews when introducing the site for the first time. This is because:

people will be much less likely to want to share them

it might instantly scare them off (the last thing I want them to think is we’re just another generic site in the niche)

if the viral carrots perform well, they should lead people down the rabbit hole to the more serious stuff later anyway

#2 Email outreach to the blogs I link out to

The importance of linking out to cool resources and then emailing the authors to thank them for their resource is widely known as a great strategy to get people to share your content.

This is why I’m making sure each of my 18 pieces of content have at least 10 outbound links so I have 180 people to thank, who will potentially share the articles with their followers.

I’ll implement this by using a very simple email template:

I’m making sure all the resources I link out to are from sites with a large social following, so if the person does end up sharing my content, it will get exposed to a decent sized audience each and every time.

Conclusion

This post shares a few ideas on how to leverage your content to maximize your new site’s potential of going viral on launch day! Do give it a share if you think it’s cool

Key takeaways:

promote your new site with only the most share-worthy content first

make sure the fun stuff gradually leads to the serious stuff

avoid promoting conflicting products so people are clear about what you recommend

Although I will also be doing a bit of forum marketing and a couple of promoted posts on Facebook, email outreach is going to be at the forefront of my strategy because I don’t have an audience “on-tap” to share to as soon as the site goes live.

What ways would you build up a ready to share audience without a website?

Since I'm planning to drop a hippo in a paddling pool, choosing the right niche is only the first step. If you really want to blow the competition out of the water you've got to fatten the hippo up first.

Fattening up the hippo requires coming up with better content that is not just smarter, but also packs a much heftier punch.[Continue Reading...]

In my last post I revealed the exact process I went through to choose a niche I cannot just compete in, but dominate.

Since I’m planning to drop a hippo in a paddling pool, choosing the right niche is only the first step. If you really want to blow the competition out of the water you’ve got to fatten the hippo up first.

Fattening up the hippo requires coming up with better content that is not just smarter, but also packs a much heftier punch.

Fattening Up the Hippo

Although I have heaps of experience in the niche I’ve chosen, I still don’t consider myself an expert, which is why after choosing the niche I ordered a ton of books from Amazon, powered up Evernote and meticulously combed through them, page by page, noting down each and every key point I can use to back up my arguments.

Simply quoting from books in your blog posts will set you miles apart from the competition because you’ll sound more professional if you base arguments on literature rather than on just other people’s watered down blog content. You’ll also be able to use cool quotes in Tweets

Are You Crazy?

You might say dedicating so much precious time to reading is crazy and I’d be way better off starting to write content immediately, but what I learned at University is if you do it the other way round – write and research as you go along it will not only be a struggle, but also you’ll end up with very poor content.

I always got the best marks when I’d done a sh*t load of research first, planned meticulously and then when it actually came to writing I could churn out ideas fluidly because so much stuff was already bouncing around my head.

So, 14 days out of the 90 I’ve got to make a $9K/pm authority site have been spent reading. Now I’ve got over 30,000 words of notes in Evernote, am buzzing with article ideas and genuinely feel that the articles I produce will be fat enough to blast all my competitors out of the paddling pool.

Productive Reading Breaks

To avoid going completely insane and having a brain meltdown, I didn’t just spend the last couple of weeks reading, I had regular breaks to continue the game plan for the website.

If you read my previous post you’ll have seen I built an excel to track:

Who’s consistently ranking

How much fresh content there is in the niche

Which article title’s go more viral

This is what is looks like:

As you can see, I noted down the top 10 websites that were ranking for a bunch of target keywords so I could see if there was an opportunity in the niche.

After I realised the niche was insanely tappable, I didn’t just stop, relax and crack open a beer to celebrate. Nor did I consume the entirety this 5 litre carton of wine:

NO!!! I continued foraging for keywords and didn’t stop until I’d listed all the stats of the top 10 articles for 180 keyword ideas. Yes, one hundred and eighty, that’s a grand total of 1800 articles to mine for content holes.

These were all painstakingly punched into an excel manually, so please don’t tell me if there’s an automatic way to do this, I’d rather not know :S

With all this data at my fingertips not only can I clearly see which kind of articles are going viral in the niche, or which keywords are the most easy to rank for, but it also revealed almost every single competitor and link prospect in the niche, cutting out the need to do that work separately

In effect, I’ve been able to kill various birds with one stone as I now have a list of 491 sites I can build relationships with, market my content to and reach out for links. Sure, there are a lot of direct competitors in the excel and some sites that only occasionally write about the niche I’m attacking, but in the next post I’ll explain my process for dividing these up with tags on BuzzStream so you can easily identify the right people to reach out to with just a couple of clicks!

Content Mining

So with 180 potential keywords to go after (all with at least 200+ average searches per month), I was ready to select my target keywords to craft the first set of articles around for when the site goes live.

Since the new site is going to be divided into 5 core categories, for the sake of not making it appear sparse when we release it to the world I decided to settle on 18 initial keywords to write 18 kickass articles.

This means each category will house at least 3 juicy articles, so the site already looks busy on the day it goes live.

Here’s the process I went through to choose the right type of keywords for the initial launch:

Selecting Untapped Words

Because the site is going to appear out of nowhere, fresh off the block with no followers, subscribers or relationships to draw on for links and sharing, the keywords I selected for the first 18 articles are not my “Star” keywords.

I’ve decided to wait a few weeks before going after the “Star” keywords so that I’ve at least got a “happy-to-share” following and some solid contacts to reach out to when I really need articles to rank.

So, I’ve chosen severely untapped keywords that have medium to low search volume, (averaging at around 3,000 searches per month) so I can focus more on the viral impact and less about rank.

This doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t care about ranking for these low search volume keywords. In fact, I rather do care, but the point is that I don’t need to put much effort into ranking them because they should rank effortlessly without any need for hands on link building.

Here’s an example of one of the untapped keywords I’ve chosen and why I’ll be able to rank for it:

Out of the top 10 results on Google, only #7 has the keyword in the title and none of the other results focus strictly on that subject.

This is a content hole dying to be filled! – so if I simply create a more focussed resource, with the keyword in the title and make the article highly shareable, it should be able to rank in the top of the pack without me needing to build any links manually.

Even if it doesn’t rank, it’s not the end of the world for me because it’s not an important keyword.

Mine & Craft Viral

As you can see, creating viral, shareable content is at the forefront of my strategy to make my site come out of nowhere and blow everybody else out of the paddling pool. In order to know exactly what kind of content goes viral in the niche, I cherry picked the most viral articles from my list of 1800 articles and put them all together in a new excel.

The pattern that emerged was startling. Almost all the top performing articles are lists:

But what makes these lists extra special in a niche dominated by lists (sorry the titles are hidden), is that these lists appeal to a wider audience than those just interested in the niche, which has caused people who wouldn’t usually share this sort of content to share it too.

Appealing to a Wider Audience

If you’re thinking about going into a niche about body building, for example, rather than making a post that’ll only appeal to people in the niche, e.g. “Best Workout Routine for Building Muscle Fast”, why not structure the post a little differently to appeal to everyone who loves movies?, e.g. “Bane VS Batman: Which is the Best Workout Routine?”

You could still write about the same subject – a workout routine that builds muscle fast, except you’ll be comparing two different techniques with very different results. People could even vote which routine is the best and might even ask girls’ opinion on which body they prefer, Batman or Bane. Who knows, but just by adding the movie touch to the post you’ll attract way more eyeballs to something that could have just been another un-shareable, dull workout routine.

So…my strategy for the first 18 articles is to make the majority of them epic lists that are not just shareable to those solely interested in the niche, but to anyone who sees then pop up on Facebook or Twitter.

Conclusion

Appealing to the wider audience is not about being too broad and losing track of your niche’s focus. It’s about crafting your content to reach more opportunities. If you’re building a new niche site like me, I’d recommend always having the question “would people share this” in mind for every single article you write.

With all the above research and planning done, I began writing the first of the 18 articles yesterday

In the next post I’m going to reveal how I’m preparing to reach out to the right people when the site goes live for each of the first 18 articles. I’m also going to reveal how I’ve chosen just three products to initially promote on my site and how I’m going to use a number of viral articles to funnel my target customers to one of the three highly converting products.

Passion VS Opportunity

The niche I’ve chosen for my new authority site was not my first choice, but after I analysed each market thoroughly using the strategy below, it was easy for me to see which niche would be easier to dominate so I can stand out like a meerkat in the arctic.

What’s Ranking?

First I punched my target keywords into Google search to see what kind of competition reared its’ ugly head.

I made a spreadsheet that lists the top 10 ranking sites on Google for each keyword I’m planning to target, along with: PR, Article Date, Article Title, Tweets, FB Likes, G+ shares and pins. Here’s what my excel spreadsheet looks like:

If you want to get super analytical you could even add a word-count column!

The more I filled this out, the more I began to see a pattern appear. It wasn’t long before I could see:

Who’s consistently ranking

How much fresh content there is in the niche

Which article title’s go more viral

As the spreadsheet grew larger and the same sites kept popping up for a number of different keywords, I began to see vulnerabilities gradually reveal themselves. These vulnerabilities are what I like to call “Domination Invitations”.

5 Domination Invitations

Domination Invitations are what the name suggests – invitations for you to swoop in to an untapped niche and dominate it!

Here are the 5 Domination Invitations you should look for when choosing a niche you can dominate:

#1: The Blog-less

There are a few niches in which people don’t manage a blog on their site, let alone produce fresh content on a consistent basis. These sites may be ranking for some pretty neat keywords but only a few, because as long as they’re not producing anything new, they’ll only maintain some dominance for a select amount of search terms. These guys will also typically only target one or two keywords, thinking those are the only keywords they need to rank for.

Although this isn’t a blog-less niche, here’s a great example of how you could swoop in with some more up-to-date content for a keyword that’s searched over 3,000 times a month!

The lack of freshness and variety in a niche will allow you to ripple past the competition, without them even realising it, until it’s too late and you’ve already overtaken them.

#2: The Closed Book Clan

Those of the “Closed Book Clan” are easy to spot. They’ll share a few nuggets of valuable information with their readers, but only up to a certain point. They won’t let you in on their real secrets unless you sink money into one of their eBooks or online courses. You have to invest in them to find the information you really want.

If you discover a lot of the competition in a potential niche to be members of the “Closed Book Clan” then this is good news. You can bring a fresh vibe to the niche by being a more open source of information and steal their frustrated audiences from right under their noses.

#3: Too Sterile or Embarrassing to Share

There are two types of content that really stand out as un-shareable. The dead pan boring, no imagination in the title, keyword stuffed rubbish, and the too saucy or risqué content that would bring utter embarrassment to you when your friends see that you’ve liked it on Facebook.

Once you’ve filled out the excel I described earlier, with the stats of all the top 10 performing articles for each target keyword, you’ll see a pattern that’ll reveal quite clearly how crafting your article’s title will have a massive effect on social share volume. For example, which would you share?

#1: How to satisfy my girlfriend in bed
#1: 7 things women wish men did more in the bedroom

There are plenty of niches out there jammed full of content just like #1 there – titles simply catered towards word-for-word search terms that make them nuclear for social sharing.

Find a niche that has plenty of this type of un-shareable content, create better titles so it’s shareable, and then watch your competition wonder how the hell you turned an embarrassing problem into a viral hit.

#4: Neighbourhood Bully

Don’t be put off if there is there’s a big “how-to” neighbourhood bully parked in the top spots for a load of your target keywords.

Generic how-to sites like Wiki-How may have dozens of writers and a powerful SEO team to call upon, but what they lack is the ability to write truly compelling / authoritative content in very niche areas. Once the effect of their glossy images begins to wear off and you actually read their content, you’ll often find it’s poorly written and very generic. It simply doesn’t go as deep as a real expert can.

It’s likely that most of the other kids on the block are too scared to stand up to the neighbourhood bully and have let him dominate the rankings for quite a while. This is where you come in! You can be the first person to stand up and fight back. Use Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique to out-write and out rank the ‘Neighbourhood Bully”.

#5: Old School 500’s

Comb the landscape of your potential niche to see how many of the top ranking articles are only 500 or so words.

If the lay of the land is littered with these “old school 500s” you’ll have discovered an arable gold mine.

It’ll only be a matter of time before you plough through this content wasteland in your shiny new combine harvester and claim the top spot with a 1000 acre piece of land!

Conclusion

If you find a niche with at least two of these Domination Invitations you’ll have a huge chance at rolling in and taking a lion’s portion of the pie. Find all five of the above and you’ll be laughing

Make sure you sign up to the adventure so you can get updates each time I share another step towards building a $9K/pm authority site.

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http://www.clambr.com/90-days-to-build-a-9k-per-month-authority-site-from-scratch/#commentsWed, 16 Oct 2013 16:45:27 +0000http://www.clambr.com/?p=1830

When one adventure ends a new one begins...

120 days ago I quit my job in Beijing
20 days ago I left China
7 days ago I moved to a hideout in France
Today I begin a 90 day adventure to build a 9K+ per month authority site

Over the next 90 days you're invited to learn how to build a brand new authority site from scratch that'll earn $9K+ per month.[Continue Reading...]

120 days ago I quit my job in Beijing
20 days ago I left China
7 days ago I moved to a hideout in France
Today I begin a 90 day adventure to build a 9K+ per month authority site

Build a $9K+ Per Month Authority Site in 90 Days

Over the next 90 days you’re invited to join my adventure to build a brand new authority site from scratch that’ll hopefully earn $9K+ per month.

I’ll be breaking down the entire process on clambr.com, as I build a new authority site from scratch and after the 90 days are up (on 13 January 2014) I’ll reveal exactly how much profit it’s making per month! Pretty cool right?

From beginning to end you’ll be able to look over my shoulder and learn my strategies for:

Choosing a niche and carefully planning your attack

Building a SEO juiced up WordPress site primed for conversions

Creating and promoting viral content that sucks in traffic and drives income

Getting powerful links from competitors and high PR sites

Converting tons of visitors into wallet out buyers

When you sign up to the adventure you’ll not only receive updates from the blog, but also get behind the scenes access and my full attention to any questions you have about building your own authority site.

So if you want to learn how you CAN make a highly profitable site in just 3 months, sign up for updates to “Build a $9K/pm Authority Site in 90 Days”.

I’ll be building the site from a hideout in the middle of nowhere in the French Alps. If you’re intrigued to find out what’s led me there, continue reading…

Background

I did everything I was supposed to do.

I aced my High School exams, got accepted to a good University, graduated with a Degree in Mandarin and hopped on a plane to begin a career in the country everyone is talking about – China.

I went to work for an international trading company selling steel.

After almost 1 year of working at the company I became restless. The methods we used to get new business were inefficient and needed a serious overhaul.

I convinced my boss to let me do something about it and made them a fresh website that attracted hundreds of enquiries on drip feed.

For the first time ever customers were chasing us rather than us chasing them and we were pulling in new business. I then made the company two more websites to drive enquiries to their laminate flooring side of the business.

Making these websites allowed me to really experiment with how the internet works and sparked my love for SEO.

By early 2013 I’d created a nice little portfolio of sites that gave the sales team a steady flow of new business, however, I wasn’t seeing enough monetary return for my efforts.

I was still only earning enough to pay rent and party about once a week. By the end of each month I was always struggling to make ends meet and all too often ended up with nothing in the bank.

Let’s clambr!

Since I’d developed a real passion for SEO and thought I could use what I’d learned to build my own popular site, I purchased the domain – clambr.com.

All I knew is that I wanted to write about SEO and learn more about how it works in the process.

There was no real direction in my first few posts which altered between sharing some of my newbie SEO advice, joking about the internet and then finally explaining why I quit my job at the beginning of June 2013.

Goodbye 9 to 5

When I quit my job it wasn’t necessarily “the right time”. I had barely any money in the bank, no back up careers lined up and was stuck in China, half the world away from my home in the UK.

Everyone said I was nuts to quit and that I should have waited until I had enough money from outside ventures to justify leaving the security of a pay check. But I didn’t. I wasn’t going to waste one more minute of my time dragging my feet into a job that was frankly not getting me any closer to my dream – to be fully self sufficient and have the freedom to do what I want everyday.

In the following few weeks after I left stable employment I began allocating every hour of the day towards refreshing my knowledge of SEO, learning how affiliate marketing works and how the heck to get visitors to clambr.com, which at the time was only known to my family and friends.

Before clambr was born, I had never done any of the offsite stuff – the real magic for pulling rank in the SERPS.

I needed to learn this and FAST, because my seriously depleting bank balance would soon render me in trouble if I didn’t get some sort of income quick snap.

Going Viral

I knuckled down and used Brian Dean’s Skyscraper technique to make an expert roundup post that went viral. This opened the flood gates to clambr and gave me the motivation I needed to realise that getting traffic to an unknown blog is possible if you apply the right strategies.

Since my link building tools roundup went viral I’ve done a few more blog posts about my link building activities and one more roundup about local SEO. Not much, I know, and I’ve been regularly asked, “so when is the next blog post Richard? What’s going on?”

Frequent Explosions

If you’ve read some of my blog posts in the past or seen me occasionally explode on Twitter, you may have gathered how much of a struggle it has been for me to to run a blog from China. Seriously dude, it’s whack. This YouTube video perfectly captures the feeling I get when Twitter gets blocked or Google goes blank, or I have to wait 2 minutes for someone’s page to load when the Great Firewall is f*cking with me.

I was dealing with the combination of crappy internet and China’s Great Firewall every damn day. It was slowing me down big time and having a detrimental effect on my ability to promote my posts, socialize, or even browse the web!

In a nutshell running an internet business from China was not working out. It was like trying to flog a dead horse to Donald Trump and it was bringing me down.

So, I made a decision…

…I packed my bags, handed my keys back to the landlord, caught the subway to the airport and left China.

Hello Britain

Upon arriving back in the UK I met up with my brother, who is equally passionate about digital marketing and has also recently left the 9 to 5.

We spent a couple of weeks plotting our next move and have decided to “squad up”, knuckle down and build an authority site together.

After drilling through dozens of ideas we suddenly realised there was a niche we both have a lot of experience in and a quick look at the competition has revealed a perfect angle we can attack it.

Mountain Hideout

With the niche chosen we packed out bags, boarded a plane from Bristol airport, flew to Geneva, got a bus to Annemasse, a train to Cluses and then a taxi to our final destination – a small village nestled in the French Alps called Les Carroz.

We arrived 7 days ago and it’s a hideout fit for an epic adventure. It’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded my mountains, with no distractions and has something I haven’t had the privilege of for a very long time – LIGHTENING FAST INTERNET!

Be Adventurous

This is where clambr will be beaming out to you for the next couple of months and it is here where my brother and I will begin building a brand new authority site from scratch.

If you’re ready to take a step forward and start your own adventure towards building a solid income online, sign up for updates today and let the adventure begin!

Australia Local SEO Strategies

I wouldn’t call this a kick-ass strategy but if you play by the rules, Google will make sure they’ll give you a fair go on their places listings. Just make sure that once you start building citations (Name, Address, Phone number) you stay very consistent with the data you submit. Also make sure that you make the listing as relevant as possible, with the right categories and don’t try to stuff keywords in the listings.

Be aware that if you’re call tracking for your client, you use a system that will consistently show Google the same number across the board, even if visitors are seeing different numbers.

There’s just a few steps I would go through to make sure that you get your Google places set up:

Step 1 – Claim your listing

That’s obviously most important. You’ll want to make sure you pin verify it (phone or via mail) and fill it out correctly, including all the different categories.

These days it’s a little bit more difficult to “game” than it used to be, in that you don’t want to do keyword stuffing or anything like that. If it so happens that your business name has a keyword in it, that actually works in your favour, but don’t go out of your way to try and stuff keywords in there just for the sake of it.

When you fill it out make sure you input as much information as you can – photos, videos, and fill out all of the address information.

It’s also really important that you get some consistency across the web on how you write your address – especially important when you start collecting citations (more on that in a moment). For example, if you enter your address as let’s say “Suite One 284 St Kilda Road”, be consistent in using that across the web. Don’t then start to use something like 1/284 for example – there is a difference and Google sees it as a difference. So, choose one and make sure you apply it throughout.

Step 2 – Setup a Google+ page

Now, they’re still very closely interlinked so make sure you setup a business page and you get those two tied together. You’ll actually find that if you set up your website, you claim your Google local listing and you get your Google+ page setup, if done right and you enter the URL in Google the search box, you’ll often see reviews and things like that appearing underneath your search results (called Rich Snippets).

As far as your Google+ is concerned, it’s very similar, you’ll want make sure you fill it out correctly, load in photos and add some additional content. Keep an eye on that, I think it’s going to become more and more important

Step 3 – Get reviews

I’d say at least 5. To do that you’ll need to send people to your Google+ business page and get people to post reviews. They’re going to need a gmail account, but if you do it, it’ll definitely help with your rankings.

Step 4 – Citations

Citations are just references about your business and its address around other websites and directories. Look for local directories that are obviously local to the business – for example, if you’re a Melbourne based business then having a look at something like True Local or Yellow Pages and other similar directory listings.

They’re really the 4 steps you’ll need to get started!

And one more suggestion, it’s a good idea to imbed a map on your contact us page and have the business anchored in there.

1. No Local SEO campaign is the same. Each campaign is tailored, optimised and run differently, depending on industry, keywords, search engine and competition. There is no set strategy that must apply to each business, but each customer requires it’s own in-depth strategy before rankings are achieved.

2. Don’t underestimate how important local content can be for your website! The aim for our clients is to make them more relevant to the search engines, particularly for local search results. This makes it very important to have landing pages on your site. If the client is particularly focussing on major cities or suburbs across Australia, then we would generally look at setting up separate landing pages on each direct location. If the business has an office in the location or near that location, we will generally link across to the Google Maps and address and point the customer to the closest location.

3. Use Google+ and build up your social profile. We have had major success with our clients by getting them socially connected and particularly through Google Plus. It is also beneficial to connect with those that are physically located close to your business location.

4. Use Australian directories and citation links and point them back to your maps listing. To rank higher in the local search results, it is important that Google sees your business as the most relevant to the keywords and this will certainly be improved if each of the local directories use the same business address and connect them all together.

5. Repeat your business address in the footer of your site and connect your contact us page directly with your Google+/Google Maps listing.

6. Add reviews and photos to your business listing on a regular basis and do your best to interact with your client base.

Consistency

The biggest mistake small business makes is varying accuracy of business details. Citations are a huge signal of authority to Google, and getting it right is one of the biggest wins you can have – and it’s dead easy to get right.

Ensuring all your listings, on all internal, and external web properties is as close to identical as you can, even down to ensuring you use the same format for your area code in every listing. For example, for phone numbers, use either (023) 465 XXX or 023 465 XXX. It’s doesn’t really matter which one, just pick one format and stick with it.

2 things we focus on with local SEO is besides the NAP which I believe everyone does, we focus on NAP showing up in as many localised websites as possible, Google loves NAP consistency which is localized.

One other method which we focused on is the schema.org geographic markup using div tags on the home page of the site. It is an effective method which we find works a treat.

First and foremost, sign up to Google+ local and have your profile 100% filled out with as much accurate information as possible.

SEOs should always keep in mind the importance of NAP consistency when submitting across multiple local directory platforms. I’ve also compiled up 30+ of the best Australian citations to give local marketers a head start in their local SEO conquest – http://www.bigvisionseo.com.au/free-australian-local-citations. Create an Excel spreadsheet and document your submissions along with username and passwords in case business details do change in future, this will make it much easier for you to make any necessary changes to your NAP details.

Most businesses have built solid relationships with their clients/customers over the years of operation. Kindly ask your loyal customers to leave reviews on your Google Local page. Businesses who have been in operation for many years can instantly start seeing results if executed properly.

There are two tactics I like to start with when we embark on new clients.

Phone Numbers Co-citation Analysis

The “citation” means you need to analyze which domains list competitors’ phone numbers. The “co” in co-citation means you need to get your client listed on them too.

This is one of my preferred tactics for identifying the quickest opportunities to build some links/mentions – if they list competitors, there’s a chance they will list you too.

Start with a search query which returns local results, and note the phone numbers down.

Additionally, visit each site and compare the phone numbers on their Contact Us pages with those displayed in Google SERPs. If any are different, write those down too.

Set the number of search results to 100 per page; query Google for each phone number, and grab the URLs in a .csv file (you can install browser plugins to extract the URLs). Keep appending URLs to the same file until you’re done with all the numbers that you collected. Trim all the URLs to root, then de-dupe (use Excel for this). I prefer doing this whole process manually, but you could use the Local Citation Finder Tool by Whitespark.

Review each unique domain to assess its quality (spam or not) and check to see if you’re listed there. If the site is good, then find ways to list your business.

A variation of this tactic is to replace the phone number with the brand names.

Competitor Backlink Analysis

This is another of the fastest and easiest ways to identify opportunities, but it requires access to some paid tools.

Collect the backlinks of the competitors who show up in organic listings, as well as on local results. Use the tool(s) of your choice (Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and/or Ahrefs). If you collect from multiple sources, don’t forget to de-dupe the URLs first.

Then trim the URLs to root, de-dupe again based on root domains, and start by analyzing home pages (don’t waste time analyzing individual URLs from the same domain – if the home page reveals a spammy site, it will be a waste of time). You need to assess the quality of each home page/domain individually and manually (sorry, there are no tools to replace your brain, yet).

Mark those which are obvious spam as “spam” and those who need more attention with “investigate”.

For those sites that you deemed ok, write down the tactic used (testimonial, blogger, local listing, magazine mention, etc.) and whether the link looks organic or built, and make a quick note on how you think they achieved those links.

Once you do this for all competitors, brainstorm each tactic with your client and pursue those that are achievable.

“What is the most kick ass strategy you’ve used to make a brick and mortar business go from invisible to unmissable in local search?” – This is a difficult question to address since the final result for your SEO efforts, in general, remains a moving target. I can say that we really enjoy working with start-ups and helping convert their ideas into an on-line digital presence designed to convert visitors into leads. This type of start-up situation scenario allows for best practices to be applied right from the beginning and we don’t have to worry about previous SEO efforts or negative reviews, etc.

Back in April 2012, Search Gurus Inc. was approached by Pro-Loc Interlocking and Landscape Design, a small company starting a seasonal business. The owners wanted to put all their marketing efforts into on-line advertising. They had no domain name, no hosting, no email, nothing.

Pro-Loc Interlocking and Landscape Design had no website before working with Search Gurus. In a previous business venture by the same owners, their business website was outdated and not converting website visitors into leads or customers. Moreover, if you Googled their previous business name, their website wouldn’t show up until the third or fourth page, or worse. If you searched for relevant Interlocking Brick Contractors in Toronto and the GTA, they were absolutely nowhere to be found.

With that in mind, Pro-Loc Interlocking and Landscape Design and the Search Gurus decided to come up with a grass-roots internet marketing campaign that would essentially grow organically from scratch. Once the domain www.pro-loc.ca was decided upon, we focused on the basics: Framework, Design, Content and site maintenance. The first step was to create a new search engine friendly website, followed by submission to all the local search directories, create a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube, and finally, regularly update their website and social media outlets.

Today, as a result of our grass roots organic marketing strategy, you can Google “Pro-Loc Interlocking and Landscape Design”, “Pro-Loc Interlocking” or even “Pro-Loc” to find their business dominating not only the first page, but the first several pages. You can Google pretty much any “Interlocking” related keyword phrase and find them on the first page of all major search engines. Pro-Loc Interlocking and Landscape Design now dominates the search for their local keyword terms and the total number of goals completed are constantly increasing. We have bumped the competitive incumbents off their pedestals and maintain great exposure for our client.

The most kick ass strategy, eh? I don’t know about a “Kick-ass” strategy. I have to say most SMB’s biggest problems is missing the basics.

But if I had to narrow it down to one, then I suggest they get more than 5 positive reviews on their Google+ Local listing because then they get those beautiful review rich snippets showing up next to their listing. Having golden stars showing up next to your listing will greatly improve their CTRs, assuming they are ranking on the 1st page already for their main “money” local terms. If they are not ranking yet, then they need to make sure they’ve claimed their Google+ local page and claimed all their major local directory listings (referenced as citations in our industry)… keep that NAP (Name, Address, & Phone) info clean and consistent when doing it. This will build enough mentions/links about that local business that often they can rank well locally for their main terms.

Some dirty (or slightly grey hat) things you can do is to steal secondary rankings in your space by building links to your citation listings… and you can build some crappy links to those pages too without much worry. Take your Yelp page listing (usually well optimized for onpage seo) and tap it with some cheap backlinks bought off Fiverr.com or your Yellowpages listing, etc… I’ve never nuked one of those pages. If you do this, then sometimes you can also get those listings to rank well too, thus controlling more of the google first page real estate on for you local terms.

Step 1) Our first step at StepForth is always to ensure our client’s NAP is stated throughout their website and that it is equally consistent on key 3rd party sites. I say key because the process of conforming the NAP across all citations can be extremely time consuming so we ensure we have prioritised the list beforehand to target the sites we are relatively certain have the most impact in Google’s local algorithms.

Step 2) We work with our clients to brainstorm appropriate methods of requesting reviews on a regular (but not annoying/heavy-handed) basis. I should note this is surprisingly difficult for the majority of clients and most find it difficult to implement and maintain despite our help; frustrating for us since the positive impact on results from reviews is noticeable.

Step 3) Local presentation is a key aspect of building the local credibility of a given company in Google’s “eyes”. Here are a few methods we use to do this whenever possible:

a) Depending on the business and their potential to be active in their community we often recommend building their exposure in offline and online news sources; either through charitable participation/contribution and/or making connections to increase the odds they will be covered in a news column or two.

b) Contact local bloggers of note and ask if there is any opportunity to obtain some exposure on their site through either an interview or providing content that would be of value to their readers and relevant to the client’s business.

c) Ensuring the client’s blog is regularly updated with shareable (AKA high quality) content. This can be done on a casual basis with a minimum post rate of one per week or by using a well planned content schedule to take advantage of each seasonal boost in need/desire for their products/services.

Step 4) Metrics! The one major SNAFU we have to deal with is Google has not made it easy to quantify ROI from local SEO; Google Analytics doesn’t highlight traffic that comes from the local pack in search results. As a result, we try to setup goals and advanced segments to specifically provide insight into the value proposition of this investment in local SEO.

Malaysia Local SEO Strategies

Back in the days when Google was showing the “More about this place” section at the bottom of Google Places listings, I noticed that there was extremely high correlation between additions to the timing when additions to this section were made and increase in organic rankings of the listing.

These changes usually occurred during the so-called “index pushes” (when Google pushes all their collected citations data to their business clusters index) and was the most accurate way to understand when these pushes were coming.

What I discovered, however, is that some citations were being added to the section faster, and thus rankings also increased faster.

The most notorious examples of such were Judysbook (yes, not Citysearch, or any other site of the City Grid network) and Qype (long before Yelp bought it). This was especially the fact when there were reviews associated with these listings.

In general, reviews significantly increased the time a citation was associated with the corresponding Google Places listing.

So my advice is – create an actionable, coherent, fitting-your-business-model strategy for obtaining reviews not just on Google, but also on other review sites. Reviews on specialized sites (such as RateMDs, DealerRater, Wellness.com) could give you an added advantage.

New Zealand Local SEO Strategies

Local Search First Page Domination…

We have a client who manufactures and supplies grappling dummies used for MMA (mixed martial arts) training. They have a .com domain (gTLD) which meant the search engines gave their site less weight within other country specific search results such as Google NZ (one of their main target markets).

The first thing we did was change their domains geographic target to New Zealand to help the search engines understand which target location to associate the .com domain with (nothing out of the box here but the results were immediate). Next a local link building strategy was executed. This focused on gaining high authority, New Zealand specific links to improve their sites authority and relevancy within Google NZ.

Now that the site had top organic rankings the next step was to leverage referral traffic sources to increase their brand awareness, and obtain multiple first page listings (the real magic begins). We did this by optimising a YouTube video targeting their main product keyword. We then created an SEO optimised press release and distributed it to two of the top news sites in the country.

This resulted in four first page listings for their main keyword, a 713.79% increase in organic search traffic and 401.12% increase in sales.

The Foundation to All Local Search – Keywords on Your Website

There are lots of strategies that will make a website fly locally; and in truth it is normally a combination of many that will yield the very best results.

Though the first place we always start when looking to help a company rank for local searches is their website; specifically identifying keywords they would like to target and where these should be placed on their website.

It may sound obvious, but Local Search is defined by local searches, searches such as plumber in Croydon, plumber in Oxted and electrician in Dartford; so the first thing we do is determine what local searches the client would like to be found for, and then simply arrange their website to target these searches.

This post will be a ‘nuts and bolts’ run through on the steps we take to identify keywords, then how we plan out a website to effectively target these keywords.

This is basic fundamental SEO, though the steps we go through in this post have not been carried out for the majority of Local companies websites that we see; so whilst the points I raise below are not new, sexy or exciting, get these right and already you will be ahead of your competition.

1. Identify Your Local Keywords

This is the first part of the brainstorming phase where you are identifying the sort of phrases the people might put into Google when searching for you products and services. Remember to think of words that your customer would use and not industry jargon:

a) Ask the Obvious Questions

What you do (Chiropractor, Physio, Podiatrist…)

Where you do it (Bristol, Redland, Clifton…)

Who your customers are (Sportsmen, Baby’s, Pregnant ladies…)

b) Brainstorm Keyword Combinations Using Excel

The brainstorm phase is a very important part of finding suitable keywords to target, we make sure the client is involved in this process and lots of combinations are tested – we constantly find effective keywords that resulted in really outside the box thinking about the products and service a client offers.

So for this stage take the raw keywords and start to arrange them in Excel as below, listing many variations according to service and town:

c) Google Keyword Planner

After you have a range of set of keywords to Google’s keyword planner to both assess the number of searches for these term, as well as getting more suggestions for possible keywords.

d) Download Suitable Keywords

After you have selected a nice long list of relevant keywords, with searches, download these as a CSV file, for you will then be able to arrange these onto logical groups in Excel.

2. Arrange Keywords Into Logical Groups

Download all relevant keywords and arrange into logical groups within Excel; these groups will form the basis of pages on the website:

You can see from above how page names / themes are coming out from the keyword groups: Physiotherapy Bristol as one page, and Chiropractor Bristol as another.

It is also worth noting that we will usually target a number of related keywords per page, such as Physiotherapy Bristol, Bristol Physio and so on; we make sure it is very clear to Google the each page is about a specific subject.

3. Planning the Site Into Themes

For our Clinic example we had over 40 different keyword groups & potential pages.

One of the big mistakes that many websites make is to have all these pages linking directly from the home page; this is not efficient from an SEO point of view, Google likes websites with clear themes – main headings and sub headings; such as the site plan developed in Excel below:

Once you have decided on the main themes you can expand the site plan to include all keywords:

You now have a road map for developing your site into a local SEO machine! You now know:

Precisely what to call and write about on each page

What anchor text to use when you are linking from one page to another

The most valuable keywords to target with future SEO activities

4. Linking Anchor Text

Anchor text is simply the words contained within a link to another web page; such as Click Here, More Information, Physio Bristol, etc.

Anchor text is though a great way of telling Google what the page you are linking too is about; so Click Here, does not tell Google a lot, but Physio Bristol on the other hand could be much more useful.

Use of your keywords in your anchor text for links to different parts of your website can be a very effective way of boosting the keywords you are targeting.

I’m afraid I cannot use the clinic client site as an example (for confidentiality), but looking at our website see how we target keywords by using anchor text.

The following screenshots are all links to a page that is targeting the main keyword Local SEO Marketing

a) Keywords in Your Main Menu Anchor Text

b) Keywords in Your Page Copy Anchor Text

c) Keywords in Your Footer Anchor Text

d) Use a “Breadcrumb” to Target Your Primary Keyword

One great way to boost your primary keyword on your own website is to have a link from every page on your site linking back to the home page with the primary keyword as your anchor text.

Each website will have a primary keyword that they are looking to target; for my site its Local SEO, and for the Clinics site is was Chiropractor Bristol.

The easiest way to do this is to use a breadcrumb on your site, like I have below:

5. Keywords In the Copy On Your Web Pages

Finally you need to write relevant copy on your web page which may include the keywords that page is targeting.

Fundamentally you need to write a well written page that your website visitors can engage with, and will also entice them to call you or make an enquiry.

Well, if only, if only there was one “kick ass” strategy that worked for every client, if only it were that easy but as with natural search, organic search can be a complicated beast to take on. We see differences across keywords, locations and some industries are incredibly easy whilst others (hotels etc) can be brutally tough. That said, let me give you two of the essential approaches we use here at Bowler Hat to help our local clients get found.

1. A Local SEO Audit

If we want to help someone we need to know a couple of things first.

Where are they currently?
Where do they want to be?
What does the competition look like?
What are the sites strengths and weaknesses?

By looking at the sites standing in organic search, local search and social across Google, Bing and Yahoo (natural and local) and by reviewing how well optimised the site is, the Google+ Local listing and the external factors for organic and local (links, citations, brand) we can determine what needs to be done and where the easy wins are. We form a report that then informs our approach going forward and we measure the results looking at rank in local and organic along with impressions and clicks to make sure we are going in the right direction.

So, our first killer strategy is to build our approach on a bedrock of intelligence so we can make sure we go for the easy wins and do the work that will get our client found rather than any typical generic local SEO approach.

2. Citation Consistency

It is a sad fact that most companies will take a fairly generic approach to local SEO and start just adding more citations. So, our first job is to perform an audit looking at all the important factors but the next killer strategy is to look at historic business information.

So, if NAP consistency is important then we have a few possible variations here:

4 x 3 x 2 x 2 = 48 possible NAP variations

Now, imagine a larger company with several offices, a few moves, a rebrand, a new web address, lots of phone numbers – this can get pretty complex pretty quickly.

So, our second killer strategy is a detailed review of any and all existing citations that use historical name, address, phone number or web address details. Often times we can find as many old citations with old details as new opportunities and it can be an easy win to get these updated. We increase total citation count and we increase NAP consistency at the same time – win win.

I like to think of this as sending a clear transmission to Google and any incorrect listings act as interference on that signal. The more citations we create the stronger the signal anyway but if there are a lot of listings with old details then most generic local attempts don’t address that signal noise to create a strong, clear and consistent NAP signal.

—–

So, a single killer strategy? I wish it were that easy. Ultimately, we have to look at the basics, get our on page right, get our Google+ Local profile right, make sure our citations are dialled in and then look at our marketing to make sure our site is doing everything else we need to do to raise us above the competition. In some cases, local is not enough and we have to get our organic and marketing right to compete, in others we have helped folks generate enough work to keep them busy without even needing a website and from a Google+ local listing.

I would without a doubt say video is the best SEO strategy for a bricks and mortar business to go from invisible to unmissable in local search because they work on so many levels.

Firstly, If a client introduces their business on the homepage of their website with video it allows visitors to get to know, like and trust them by putting a face to the business. This works very well on a psychological level as the medium of TV/video is very powerful. In addition, video is great sticky content, i.e. keeping people on the page longer, this is good for SEO too.

Secondly, video’s on Youtube (and other video sharing sites like Daily Motion, Metacafe etc.) when set up correctly, are also great for Local SEO and help to achieve multiple listings for your geo-targeted keywords. The video description should also include client NAP’s for citations. For more information about video marketing for local SEO click here.

Getting links for local business websites (plumbers, electricians, etc.) that other local businesses in the same area don’t already have (like those from directories, newspapers, etc.) can be difficult, especially if those businesses don’t have any content on their sites beyond sales type pages.

Creating on-site guides and tutorials is an obvious way to create linkable content, but lots of businesses either don’t have the time and/or writing skills to do that.

A great, easy alternative is to create an ‘Images To Use’ type page, for which you ask the client to take 50 or so photos of things (common faults, jobs completed, tools, etc.) related to their industry, publish those photos on their site on one page, and then make those images available for other websites to use (state this at the top of the page) so long as they link back to the client’s site as the source of the photo.

If proper descriptions (one line will do), file names and alt tags are used for those images, then they’ll naturally show up in Google image searches.

You can also be more pro-active by contacting businesses (who have no / few / poor photos on their site) in the same industry in other locations and offering them usage of the photos in return for a link.

Over time, some people will use the images without linking back, so every couple of months a reverse image search should be run to chase up links.

For me it is not about a kick ass strategy, that is sometimes dependent on the clients objectives and more often than not, budgets.

Google and Bing Local does enable local businesses the opportunity to complete with the big boys on the search landscape. Unfortunately local businesses do not always have the budget to compete against big business with a sustained med-long term SEO-digital marketing strategy.

With this view it is imperative to do the fundamentals well. These fundamentals for local search are good informative Google and Bing business listings. The key being to utilize all the features within the listings.

Spend the time adding images, videos and features of the business, all with optimised information. Nothing ground breaking but this alone has delivered really good returns for the Jellyfish SEO team.

Example of one clients listing below. This is from the listing alone, no other supported off site work. Nice numbers going on here, all from a standing start.

US Local SEO Strategies

In my experience the best things you can for a local business are as follows:

CLAIM EVERYTHING. Literally claim EVERY listing you can for them. Google+, Yahool Local, Yelp, Bing, SuperPages, CitySearch… on and on until you’ve got them all. You can use something like GetListed.org to help but there’s plenty out there beyond the usual suspects if you spend some time searching. Make sure everything is 100% accurate and matches the data in the USPS database. If there are errors in data that’s floating around, get them fixed! Consistency is REALLY important.

Once you’ve got the wheels turning on that, you need to set up local business schema.org data on your site and include a local sitemap. Again, being consistent with your data is extremely important. Make sure everything matches the profiles you’re setting up. We usually just Yoast’s Local SEO plugin now since it makes things a lot faster.

Finally, start blogging. Localize your content. Answer questions that your customers will be asking. One tactic that I’ve found useful is to set up a LiveChat widget on the site and monitor the chats for questions that come up more than once or twice. If you’re getting people asking you questions in the chat, you need to write a post about it. Make sure you don’t forget to link out to other local businesses, local resources, etc.

If you do these three things and do them correctly you’ll dominate almost any local niche. There’s other stuff you should do on top of that, such as find ways to encourage people to leave reviews on the profiles you’ve claimed, but these are my must-dos for local SEO.

Local search is a gorilla, and to explain all tactics used to help local businesses rank well would be a novel. That being said, when I take on a new client I start with three foundational tactics that set the stage for success: NAP consistency, local registrations, sitemaps (XML,KML).

Name, address and phone in the title tags and in the HTML of the sites is integral. This includes hCard formatting and placing details in the footer. The consistency across the site, and in off-site citations is where the local results are going to be fueled the most.

Local registrations, Google+ Local specifically, is a direct way to influence rankings in the various Google localized features (local pack, carousel, maps, etc…). Complete the registration as thoroughly as possible, and ensure that your homepage URL is included as a link back.

Finally, sitemaps have been somewhat of a silver bullet. IN optimizing for national sites, this is obviously an important step, but the results seen on on the local level seem to be amplified. The XML is a must, and the KML will again emphasize that location data that is necessary for the local business.

Tackling these three tactics will provide a strong foundation, presenting the opportunity to begin utilizing additional optimization strategies.

Just have a decent site, make sure the majority of your citations are up to date, you’ve claimed your Google+ page correctly, figured out how to squash all of the dupe listings and do something interesting, like marketing or something. Bottom line, most brick and mortar businesses just need to do the basics right before worrying about “kickass” strategies.

In my work with local business owners, I have found that the most poorly understood, and yet most powerfully influential concept, is that everyone who steps onto the web to market their business has just become a publisher.

Without content, you have a blank book, a magazine with no pages, a TV commercial with no narrative and a website with no power.

Given the huge influence a local business’ website has on its overall rankings, content development has to be priority #1. Too often, it is treated as an irksome chore or an afterthought.

If you want to outrank your competition, you must out-write them. You must be more organized, more persuasive and more thorough. This is the secret sauce (that should be no secret at all!) which I employ for my clients and see work time and again to set them apart from lazier or less educated competitors. If no one on staff can write – and write really well – I do all of the writing and optimization. If someone in the organization can write, I act in an editing and optimization capacity.

This is a process that should never stop. Whether for static pages, a blog or off-site outreach, your local business should act like a publishing house and never stop publishing.

1. Do not rest until all your NAP info is consistent across all your citations. Make sure you do a complete audit of your citations every couple of months.

2. Beef up your site over time. Google doesn’t favor wispy, anorexic-looking sites. At the very least, make sure you have a separate page for each specific service you offer. Better yet, do that and PERSONALLY write blog a couple blog posts each month – posts that tackle a problem your potential customers might have, and that showcase your expertise.

3. Try to get reviews on as many sites as possible – not just Google+, not just Yelp. Ask some subset of your customers to go onto InsiderPages, Yahoo, and maybe an industry-specific site or two (e.g. HealthGrades, Avvo, DealerRater, etc.). Never, ever, ever stop trying to get reviews, and always be willing to experiment (ethically!) to see what works best for you and your customers.

I know this isn’t going to sound really crazy or anything but associating the Google+ Local listing with a unique local landing page with well optimized title tags and site content brings amazing results to multi location businesses. Time and time again.

Also, ensuring that you are filling out category choices on ALL citations sources completely as google crawls other sites for category information as well.

I’ve circled in red the search phrase “bartending school” and urls that reference this smb, including the core urls, Facebook, and Yelp urls. The ppc ad is circled in black.

Important phrase: service/city.

I believe there are currently 7 competing smbs in the area for this ranking.

For some reason Google isn’t showing a map for this query at the moment. I’m not sure why. It occurred recently. Here’s an earlier screenshot showing how the same search query appeared with a map from May 2, 2012:

Why is it doing so well?

It’s down to links and its relative link strength compared to the competition.

The smb has had a ONEMAP for that search phrase, its been at the top of a PAC, and when the maps show with just smbs in the city itself, it has been sometimes #4 as it isn’t in the geo area for DC being one mile outside of the city borders.

Google changes and alters the perspective on maps from time to time.

What has worked?

Take all the elements of SEO including local:

On page:

urls
meta titles
H1’s
content,

Local
Category
Description
Citations.

Disregard the social signals. (Although this site has far more followers commentary and likes than competitors) I think they are still too new to be significant in most cases. Same with reviews, (though the reviews for this business are real and strong).

Ultimately in this smb case it’s down to links – its relative link strength versus the competition.

We do have a reasonably greater amt of citations than our competitors.

We have reasonable on page attributes…but the competitors are not dramatically different with regard to on page and citation elements.

We even have a structural issue that is on page related that hampers our site (and is currently going through revision).

So the biggest difference is link strength in this case.

How did it occur?

1. We became aware of link importance back about a decade ago and have been building links ever since. Clearly much of what we did back then has ended up penalizing the site: particularly anchor text or free meaningless directory types of links. Both of those elements have been devalued and penalized by Google.

2. Beyond that we always worked to add links, even clearly weak ones. We also always worked to create a quality service, even when we didn’t realize it, this generated commentary and links that went back to our site, and spoke well of us.

3. We have continuously worked local media for years, and worked various verticals. We have received links from them. We have also received links from business and community elements where appropriate.

That accounts for quantity. Now as to quality.

4. We are a small business in a frankly disreputable industry, which mostly carries a bad reputation, even as ours is good. What that generally means is that we can’t easily get links.

5. So we have had to do “out of the box” kinds of thinking, content creation, commentary and actions to get relatively few, but immeasurably better links than any of our competitors…both locally and to a large extent nationally. We have managed to do that.

More about Links

In the last two years we received traffic from just under 900 referral sites per GA. They aren’t all referral sites despite the way GA presents them.

Traffic from google.com.ca and every nation in the world is search traffic. Take out those and some other search oriented sites mis-categorized by GA and we still had something like 800 different sites referring about 18% of traffic with a few sites generating the lions share of volume.

WOW!

HUGE thanks to everyone who contributed to this mammoth interview and special thanks to Phil Rozek for helping get some big local SEO players involved! Please share if you think this resource is KICK ASS!

Don’t forget to link out to other local businesses, local resources etc

Blog with a well planned content schedule to take advantage of each seasonal boost in need / desire for products / services

Create “Link-bait” Content

Write onsite guides and tutorials – many businesses don’t have time or writing skills to do this, so make the effort to be helpful and it’ll work in your favour

Make an images to use page, e.g. photos of things like common faults, jobs completed, tools, etc, related to your industry. Make these images available for other websites to use as long as they link back to site as source of photo

Geographic Optimisation

Submit site maps because results on a local level are amplified. The XML is a must and the KML will again emphasise location data

You can use Yoast’s local SEO plugin to make things faster

If you’re domain name is .com but your business is local to New Zealand for example, change your domain’s geographic target to NZ to help search engines understand what location to associate the .com domain with

Add geo-specific alt attributes text to your logo as well as schema markup to make it into Google’s knowledge graph box

Optimise the EXIF data of the image to include location and ensure the same logo is used wherever the client’s site is mentioned of the web

Imbed a map on your contact us page so your biz location is anchored in there

Get Reviews

Brainstorm ways for appropriate methods to request reviews on a regular basis

Get more than 5 positive reviews on Google+ local listing (then you’ll see rich snippets appear)

Send people to your G+ biz page and get people to post reviews on your local page

Interact with your client base regularly on social media

Reviews will significantly increase the time a citation is associated with the corresponding Google places listing

Don’t just get reviews on Google, get from other review sites to get an added advantage

Ask some subset of your customers to go on InsiderPages, Yahoo and some other industry specific sites, e.g. HealthGrades, Avvo, DealerRater. Never stop trying to get reviews (ethically of course)